Gone in half the blink of an eye. Online travel shoppers, that is.
NB: This is an analysis by Manav Mital, CEO and founder of Instart Logic.
Visitors are less likely to return to a site that is even 250 milliseconds slower than a competing site.
That’s according to Harry Shum, a Microsoft executive who leads research and development efforts in search for the company’s Bing search engine.
That’s an increment of time equal to about half the amount of time it takes a human to blink. This sentiment that milliseconds matter has been repeatedly echoed by Google scientists and other leading web performance experts.
Soon half a blink might shrink to a quarter or an eighth of a blink. Customers’ expectations for page load times continue to go down.
A study by Google found that anything lasting over a second is jarring enough to break a user’s flow. With unstable and unreliable mobile internet across the globe, Google says that there’s only one thing to do: cut your website’s load time to below two seconds, or face the consequences.
Lack of speed kills customer satisfaction. Slow sites also kill profits.
One second can boost conversions by 2%
One of the leading online retailers, WalMart Labs has an engineering team in Silicon Valley and is strongly focused on web performance. The goal of WalMart is building a "zero-wait" experience for users.
Its research found that customers who converted to a sale experienced page load times of 3.22 seconds. Customers that browsed but didn’t buy experienced page load times of 6.02 seconds.
After Walmart optimized its sites to improve page load times, the Operations team recorded that every 100ms improvement led to a 1% increase in incremental revenue and every 1 second improvement led to a 2% boost in conversion rates.
In other words, a quarter of the time it takes you to blink can mean an incremental revenue boost or decline of 1%. Given this clear evidence that speed is profitable, one would think that web publishers would be rapidly speeding up their websites. In fact, that’s not necessarily the case.
Sites actually not speeding up
Despite the growing evidence of the need for speed, site speed by some measures has actually gotten worse. On tests of the leading 500 retail sites as ranked by Alexa during the winter of 2013, the median page load was 9.3 seconds.
This was a significant increase from load times of 7.7 seconds in the same period a year earlier. The slower loads was likely due to the fact that these pages had grown by 31% in size on average over that period, according to the HTTP Archive.
At the same time, pages had grown more complex with more components baked into every page. The median "Time To Interaction" – the period during which a consumer waited before they could click on something in a site – was five seconds, well above what zero-patience consumers expect on today’s networks and devices.
Travel and hospitality: Book now, browse faster
In 2013, online travel bookings tallied a record $129 billion, according to PhoCusWright. Mobile bookings topped $25 billion. So clearly there is plenty at stake in online travel.
In a December 2013 test of a wide range of major travel sites on desktop and mobile platforms, site performance company Compuware found that even the fastest travel site required more than four seconds to load.
Worse, many other sites were considerably slower. Performance on mobile sites is generally far worse than on desktop or laptop versions.
For example, Keynote Systems found that TripAdvisor loaded in 2.58 seconds on the desktop for the week ending March 16, 2014 but loaded in a startling 9.26 seconds on an iPhone4 and 8.34 seconds on an iPad2.
This is a critical failing in travel. Travel sites sell the same inventory from the same group of hotels, airlines, and rental car companies. So customers are extremely likely to abandon slower sites.
PhoCusWright found that 43% of online travel and lodging shoppers will abandon a site after 3 seconds of waiting and 20% will open another travel site in new window. So for travel sites violating the zero-patience credo customers will book elsewhere and probably never come back.
What about the tools for speed?
Unfortunately, the traditional tools for speeding up website performance cannot deliver the same type of performance boost for the newer generations of highly-dynamic and mobile web applications.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are primarily designed to deliver static cached content and they struggle with highly personalized and mobile experiences that are now the norm for e-tail, travel, ticketing and SaaS web apps.
Front-End Optimization services and software promise to accelerate throughput of web apps but often break websites and user experiences resulting in subpar performance.
Traditional tools for application delivery in the enterprise, such as ADCs and WAN Optimization, fall down when presented with massive, distributed user bases that are highly dynamic and consume dynamic amounts of bandwidth and data.
For these reasons, web applications cannot rely on old solutions to accelerate performance and enhance user experiences.
Conclusion
Zero-patience is a phenomenon that all companies delivering a product over the Internet will have to deal with in order to continue growing and to win more customers.
With alarming rapidity, customers’ expectations for web experiences grow more and more demanding.
To date, many companies in the travel, retail, entertainment and enterprise segments have delivered highly variable and often poor performance that puts them at risk of losing customers.
To deal properly with the zero patience phenomena, travel sites will need a whole new set of tools to speed up their websites and deliver premium, immersive experiences.
These tools will need to handle dynamic, personalized, client-centric web applications without forcing numerous returns to the origin server to retrieve data, a long journey that impedes performance.
The zero-patient phenomenon will drive development of an entirely new breed of zero-patience tools to speed up web applications in ways never before possible.
NB: This is an analysis by Manav Mital, CEO and founder of Instart Logic.
NB2:Laptop frustration image via Shutterstock.