83 per cent of UK consumers say consistently slow or unavailable websites negatively affect their brand loyalty, according to a study by cloud computing company Rackspace.
The survey of 2,000 people also revealed that 18 per cent of consumers would only wait 10 seconds or less for a website or page to load before they would abandon their search and look elsewhere.
Overall, 37 per cent would only give it 20 seconds to work properly.
As a result of an outage or unacceptable load time, 28 per cent said they would go to a different site to buy their chosen item and 14 per cent would go to the high street instead.
Paul Bolt, VP of technology practices at Rackspace, says: “As many retailers look to the last quarter of the year to boost sales and hit their targets, they need to make sure their sites are running properly 100 per cent of the time.
“Website error messages need to become a thing of the past if brands don’t want to risk losing revenue because of a badly performing website.”
Although the majority of shoppers said they believed traffic surges were the most common cause for website problems (58 per cent), more are recognising it’s often a result of poor design (45 per cent), poorly built websites (39 per cent) or website maintenance (39 per cent).
16 per cent said it could be due to an external problem, such as the website being hacked.
