Slow websites negatively affect business image

Nine out of ten people would switch to a competitor if a business website failed to load, according to research released this week by 1&1 Internet Ltd. In fact, nearly 53 per cent of people surveyed said they would wait only up to 30 seconds for a website to load before giving up and trying elsewhere. The study also found British consumers waste on average 2.5 days per year waiting for slow websites to load, with some 52 per cent experiencing 'web rage' as a result.

The survey of some 1,600 UK consumers concluded that nearly 80 per cent of people said that slow website loading was a major irritation when using the Internet, 71 per cent disliked websites that required specific software to run, 61 per cent were annoyed when images failed to load, and 24 per cent were turned off by domain names which are hard-to-remember.

Worryingly for UK companies, upon finding an error message on a business site, some 63 per cent of consumers would automatically source another website, with only 4 per cent willing to report the error to the business in question. This lends further weight to the theory that UK consumers are becoming increasingly impatient and unforgiving when dealing with businesses online.

The British consumer is also becoming wiser about IT issues. Some 69 per cent of those surveyed said that when a website is slow or fails to load they conclude that poor web hosting is the cause rather than their own bandwidth, Internet connection or computer. This should act as a warning to Britain's 4.3 million SMEs, as customers will clearly no longer tolerate those that have poor hosting or web design in place.

So do all consumers react alike? Men are more likely to form a negative impression of a business based on a slow website (88 per cent compared to 84 per cent of women), and are more inclined to switch to a competitor if they are experiencing problems with a business' website (67 per cent compared to 60 per cent of women).

More women than men will return to a slow or frozen website later on in the day (33 per cent of women compared to 25 per cent of men). However, women are more likely to experience instantaneous 'web rage' and complain about the website to a colleague or friend.

The Scots are the most impatient Internet consumers, with only 10.9 per cent prepared to wait between 1 and 5 minutes for a website to load before switching to a competitor, compared to nearly 28 per cent of people from Northern Ireland. However, the Northern Irish are most affected by 'web rage' caused by slow websites, with 22 per cent surveyed claiming to become physically aggressive. The Welsh were most likely to report a problem to the owner of a website, 7 per cent compared to none of the Northern Irish consumers surveyed.

Surprisingly, more than 72 per cent of silver-surfers (over 55s), the highest of all age brackets surveyed, generally blamed slow-loading websites on poor web hosting, disproving the generalisation that the older generation are not so clued up on the web and IT issues.