Posted in
Main on September 17th, 2009 by Pingdom

People are getting used to broadband connections, more powerful web browsers, and a speedier web experience in general. A new study shows how the expectations of Internet users have changed significantly over the last couple of years. We expect websites to be a lot faster.
The survey was commissioned by Akamai, the world’s largest content delivery network (CDN) provider, as a follow-up to a similar survey made back in 2006. On behalf of Akamai, Forrester Consulting surveyed 1,048 online shoppers about their expectations when shopping online (on retail sites, travel sites, etc).
Now here is a highly interesting result when you compare the new study with the old one: In the old study from 2006, people got restless if an ecommerce site took more than four seconds to load. In the 2009 study, people got restless if an ecommerce site took more than two seconds to load.
That’s a big difference. Internet users expect web pages to load twice as fast in 2009 as they did in 2006. User expectations have changed significantly in just three years.
Here are some of the findings from the study:
- 47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
- 14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.
Although this study focused on ecommerce sites, the findings should be relevant to any site owner regardless of the type of site since the results clearly show how big an effect slow load times can have on user behavior.
This is of course something that Akamai, which provides services that speed up websites, wants to shine a spotlight on.
That site performance affects user behavior has been shown in a ton of studies through the years by big players like Google, Yahoo, and others. Just a couple of weeks ago we wrote about a study of Facebook user behavior and how site performance affects page views. Site performance can be more important than you imagine when it comes to your bottom line as a site owner.
Photo by: Jason Bechtel.
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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.
Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.
What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.
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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h
This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.
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Posted in
Main on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.
Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.
We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.
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Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.
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Posted in
Main on January 31st, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.
Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.
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Andrew
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hi
So Pingdom guys are customers with the fastest website really more successfully? You must have the data from all your response time measurements. Do your customers that improve their website performance see a growth in customer numbers etc?
Regards
Andrew