28 July 2015.
Businesses targeting international markets are putting their performance at risk by having slow loading speeds, research has suggested.
A report from Nielsen has revealed that 47% of people expect a website to load within 2 seconds, and 40% will leave a website if it does not load fully within 3 seconds.
Slow loading speeds are a particular problem for international businesses because the customer will often be located thousands of miles away from the server the website is hosted on.
A recent study showed that ads on Europe-based websites can take almost 17 seconds to load in China, for example, with ads on Chinese-based websites taking a similar amount of time to load in Europe: almost 16 seconds.
As well as the obvious problem of people simply leaving a website if it does not load fast enough, slow loading speeds also cause problems with tracking sales.
They can disrupt the ad tracking process, meaning that advertisers and publishers will not have an accurate picture of where and when sales are taking place.
