Slow websites cause users to switch off

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Businesses with an online presence need to up the ante in terms of site speed and reliability if research published this week, which shows that 90 per cent of users would happily switch to a competitor is a site failed to load, is anything to go by.

And the remaining percentage of those questioned in the survey aren't that much more tolerant, with more than half (53 per cent) saying they'd only give a business website up to 30 seconds to load before hot-footing it elsewhere.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) need to pay the most heed to the survey results, which showed that British consumers are getting more and more IT savvy, with 69 per cent believing that slow site performance is more to do with poor web hosting than their own bandwidth or connection issues.

Web rage is on the increase among 52 per cent of people as a result of website tardiness, with Britons wasting, on average, two-and-a-half days a year waiting for sites to load, according to the study of 1,600 UK consumers conducted by Tickbox.net on behalf of 1&1 Internet.

Just under 80 per cent of survey respondents cited slow website loading times as a major irritation, some 71 per cent disliked websites that need specific software to run, 61 per cent were peeved by images that didn't load and just under a quarter (24 per cent) found hard-to-remember domain names to be a barrier.

Error messages also don't cut it with surfers, with 63 per cent of consumers saying they'd automatically find an alternative website, while just four per cent would bother to contact the company to inform them of the problem.

"It is no surprise how strongly consumers feel about poorly performing websites when they suffer significant stress from using them," said Andreas Gauger, chief executive of 1&1 Internet.

"As users become more dismissive of slower sites, SMEs must ensure that their market has instant access to their products and services. Our research shows that consumers do blame the website owners for a poor user-experience."

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