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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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Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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