The holiday season is one of the craziest periods of the year for retailers due to the surge in demand and the presence of fiercer competition. A sound marketing strategy is critical, among other things. We’ve told you before that promos shouldn’t be your sole focus come this time, though, as you should also look into creating specific website content for the holidays. One more thing that you should put effort into is increasing your site’s page load speed. According to a research from Radware, websites that have snail-like load speeds are in danger of losing a significant portion of holiday shoppers and revenues. To be specific, the data indicates that 57% of visitors will leave a site after three seconds if they’re unable to interact with key content. You see, consumers expect a fast, convenient, and enjoyable shopping experience online at this time (or at any point of the year, really, but the stakes are simply higher during this period), and they know that they have alternatives should your site fail to meet their standards.
Kent Alstad, one of the top executives from Radware, had this to say: “No retailer wants to abandon up to 57% of their inbound site traffic, especially during the holiday selling season. Retailers must invest in user experience for online customers, and that includes both content and page load time. Serving more content to customers is expected but the goal is delivering more content, faster. That’s the ‘magic formula.’ Web performance optimization, or lack thereof, will directly impact the bottom line for retailers this holiday season.”
Radware’s study is based on data from the real-world performance of the top 100 e-commerce websites (as ranked by number of site visits). It indicates that only 12% of retailers are currently meeting customer expectations with regard to content and page speed. With those said, plenty of online stores have a lot of work ahead of them. Fortunately, there’s still a bit of time before the insane holiday rush.
To read the original article, click here.