by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 28, 2017

Some 60% of consumers become less loyal to brands after poor website and app performance, a survey reveals, with more than 80% saying they would consider telling friends about their poor experience.

Consumers have become very demanding, and expect much more from brands. The customer survey from Apica, which monitors website performance, reveals that one in three respondents say long load times for pages and content cause them to lose patience, and three-quarters of users expect sites and apps to perform much faster than they did three years ago.

Page load times have become extremely important, especially as Google pushes to reduce the time it takes for content and pages to load. The findings from this survey also suggest that consumers have little patience for slow-loading content and pages.

The survey of 2,250 Internet users in the UK, U.S. and Sweden analyzes the changing attitudes toward a brand’s digital performance. It reveals nearly 40% won’t wait more than ten seconds for a website to respond before navigating away, and 11% won’t give a site five seconds before moving onto another.

Poor web performance has really begun to influence consumer behavior. About 10% of participants said they would never return to the brand for goods or services. Swedes are least loyal toward a brand that lets them down online, with 73% likely to turn to competitors.

The survey also revealed that users have limited patience for organizations that schedule maintenance on websites and apps with little communication. Some 46% said several hours of downtime was acceptable, but they expect to know the reasons for the downtime. While 13% expect 100% up-time, 54% of respondents were willing to wait as long as an hour.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(37)