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Smartphone users expect mobile websites to load in three seconds

The latest research shows the more mobile devices improve, the more their users are becoming impatient.

Following on the heels of a study from Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer science professor at UMass Amherst that revealed internet users with a broadband connection start abandoning online video content after two seconds if it has failed to load, a compendium of data and surveys by SmartBear shows that the average online shopper is just as impatient when it comes to the loading times for e-commerce sites even when using mobile devices.

As the world reaches the 1 billion smartphone mark, the most recent data suggests one in four Americans only surf the web with mobile devices and 60 percent of smartphone and tablet users still expect a mobile site to have loaded within three seconds -- the average time for a full web page to load on a PC via broadband internet connection. Yet despite mobile's limitations, 74 percent of smartphone users will abandon a site if the page they want hasn't loaded in five seconds. This is particularly worrying because the average page load time for the world's top 2000 retail websites is currently 10 seconds.

The latest Forrester research, published earlier in November, shows that online retail is still growing rapidly and the volume of sales will have increased by 62 percent by 2016. It also shows the areas where people are spending the most money. Clothing, event tickets, computers and digital content are all performing strongly but it's in sports and fitness, jewelry and watches and video games where the boom markets are for online shopping.