Retailers’ online sales could suffer this festive season due to slow loading landing pages.
A study undertaken by e-commerce and marketing agency Visualsoft looked into the UK’s top 250 sites to analyse growth potential over the past 12 months; this included beauty sites MAC Cosmetics, Estée Lauder, Feelunique, Boots, L'Occitane and Lush.
In the annual e-tail report it found 62% of UK e-tailer’s homepages are taking over nine seconds to load; an increase of 8% from 2017.
Meanwhile, 16% of the stores were found to take 15 seconds or longer to load, an increase of 4% compared with the year before.
Visualsoft’s CEO Dean Benson said: “Page load speed is one the biggest contributors to customer frustration, basket abandonment and lost sales, with almost 47% of customers expecting a site to load in less than two seconds.
“However, many companies are still unwittingly sacrificing load speeds as they grow their online stores.”
He continued: “The rapid growth of e-commerce may lure some brands into a false sense of security, but nobody is immune to the trouble of the retail sector. Optimising website performance is of business-critical importance.”
As a result, Google has estimated that e-tailers could be losing a minimum of 32% of potential visitors due to this slow load time alone.
