There was an article about some research which Akamai has done on user’s experiences of online stores – mainly with respect to loading times – on Slashdot yesterday and it appeared on BBC News this morning as well.

Their headline conclusion was that if a web page took more than 4 seconds to load then a company would loose sales and users of their web sites would have a negative perception of the company.

Interestingly Red Gate did some research while developing ANTS Load to understand when people began to get frustrated with a webpage and when they would eventually abandon the website. This research lead Red Gate to develop the concept of the “frustration co-efficient” and “abandonment prediction” which were then built into the results presented by ANTS Load.

Do your web pages always load in under 4 seconds – especially under heavy load?

What percentage of your users abandons your website due to poor loading times?

Do your users get frustrated when using your website?

If you are not totally sure then I suggest you grab a trail version of ANTS Load and give it a go.