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Online Retail Performance: Milliseconds Are Critical

Ari Weil

Website performance is critical to maintaining customer attention and completing online transactions, according to the latest State of Online Retail Performance report, issued by Akamai Technologies. In fact, the study found that a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent.

The data, gathered by SOASTA (now part of Akamai), represents one month’s worth of anonymous user data from top online retailers, equating to approximately 10 billion user visits. The report delivers insights into how web performance affects consumers and, ultimately, online businesses, and explores the “magic number” for page load times and the impact of one-second performance improvements — or slowdowns — on conversion and bounce rates, as well as impact of performance on session length.

Findings include:

■ Half of consumers browse for products and services on their smartphones, while only one in five complete purchases using those phones

■ A two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent

■ 53 percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load

■ Bounce rates were highest for mobile phone shoppers, while tablet shoppers had the lowest bounce rate


“Results from our State of Online Retail Performance report have shown that user experience is critical to e-commerce success, and things aren’t getting any easier,” said Ash Kulkarni, SVP and GM, Web Experience Division, Akamai. “Customers have extremely short attention spans, and degradations in website performance — no matter how small — can cause consumers to go elsewhere in an instant.”

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Online Retail Performance: Milliseconds Are Critical

Ari Weil

Website performance is critical to maintaining customer attention and completing online transactions, according to the latest State of Online Retail Performance report, issued by Akamai Technologies. In fact, the study found that a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent.

The data, gathered by SOASTA (now part of Akamai), represents one month’s worth of anonymous user data from top online retailers, equating to approximately 10 billion user visits. The report delivers insights into how web performance affects consumers and, ultimately, online businesses, and explores the “magic number” for page load times and the impact of one-second performance improvements — or slowdowns — on conversion and bounce rates, as well as impact of performance on session length.

Findings include:

■ Half of consumers browse for products and services on their smartphones, while only one in five complete purchases using those phones

■ A two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent

■ 53 percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load

■ Bounce rates were highest for mobile phone shoppers, while tablet shoppers had the lowest bounce rate


“Results from our State of Online Retail Performance report have shown that user experience is critical to e-commerce success, and things aren’t getting any easier,” said Ash Kulkarni, SVP and GM, Web Experience Division, Akamai. “Customers have extremely short attention spans, and degradations in website performance — no matter how small — can cause consumers to go elsewhere in an instant.”

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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