How Impatient the Web Consumer Can Really Be!

Earlier this year there was an interesting article about how impatient the web consumer can really be. The article cited a 2009 report from Forrester which found that “online shoppers expected pages to load in two seconds or fewer — and at three seconds, a large share abandon the site. Only three years earlier a similar Forrester study found the average expectations for page load times were four seconds or fewer.” We are now 3 years further down the road so we can assume that consumers expectations and, their impatience, are even more intense today. In new findings from SMB DigitalScape where over 2m SMB website were analyzed, 1.3 m or 61% of the site load times were 2 or more seconds. And fully a third of sites took 4 or more seconds to load. Like many of the findings from SMB DigitalScape, it is just one more important data point which spells trouble for the local SMB merchant. Coupled with few sites being optimized for the mobile user, SMBs run the real risk of being left behind for larger providers who can offer the consumer a lightening fast mobile experience.