Application delivery and solutions firm Radware released its latest quarterly “State of the Union” report, and revealed interesting information on E-retail website load times.

Radware looked at the top 500 Ecommerce sites and platforms and found an average load time of 9.3 seconds, a 21% increase than last year. The report also found 50% of these sites took 10 seconds or longer to load a page.

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The fact these numbers are going up is surprising given the advances in global internet performance and the link between conversions to site performance. Amazon reported that an additional 100 milliseconds on load times can result in decreased conversion rates of up to 1%.

One of the main reasons of the slowdown relates to page content. Currently there is an average of 99 resources on an Ecommerce page. These resources, such as images and CSS files, are up from 93 the year prior. Higher resolution screens and more capable hardware for image rendering have caused an increase in resource size as well. A 31% increase on average per resource was recorded, showing the average 1094KB per resource is now 1436KB.

Web performance evangelist at Radware Tammy Evert states slow performance to has a more negative affect than site outages.

“Slowdowns occur 10 times more frequently than outages, and over time, slowdowns can have double the negative financial impact as outages”This also has a major long-term impact on customer retention, as the permanent abandonment rate for a slow site is up to three times greater than the abandonment rate for a site that is down,” says Everts.

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