The ‘United States Website Speed Report‘, a comprehensive pan-sectoral study of business websites in the United States, delivers a foreboding outlook for eCommerce retailers in 2019, finding that websites in that business sector take more than twice as long to load as time-pressed consumers will wait before taking their business elsewhere. 

Based on an analysis of 11-million websites throughout a wide range of US business sectors, the ‘United States Website Speed Report’ shows that General eCommerce Retail websites in the US take an average of 7.51 seconds to load fully on mobile devices, making it the slowest of all the business sectors surveyed. Research indicates that 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

The ‘United States Website Speed Report’, created by leading digital agency, AGENT Digital, is a warning call to US businesses across all sectors to slash their website loading times and retain customers throughout the year. 

No business sector was found to have an average website speed under the recommended speed standard of less than 3 seconds. The average speed across all sectors was 7.76 seconds, according to the AGENT Digital report.

At more than twice the recommended industry speed standard of less than three seconds, the General eCommerce Retail finding was described by AGENT managing director Kevin Meaney as “a wake-up call”.

“Google research shows us 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load,” Mr Meaney said. “Based on the industry standard of a 3-second load time, even the fastest US sector is losing over half of its mobile site visitors. According ot Statista, there are 237.6-million smartphone users in the US this year, forecast to increase to 270.66-million by 2022—this really highlights the scale of the issue,” he stated.