Ireland’s largest marketing communications company, Core research has today released research which shows that most Irish websites take an average of 10.25 seconds to load fully on a mobile device, well in excess of the magic ‘three second rule.’ 
 
Core monitored 100 Irish websites across a variety of sectors including automotive, banking, insurance, media, grocery retail and telecoms to see how long it took for the home page of each website to fully load on a mobile device. The average was 10.25 seconds, three and a half times longer than the suggested three second mark.

The best performing category were grocery retailers, with an average page load time of 7.4 seconds, while the slowest category was the media industry at 24.4 seconds.
 
Core research say that with searches performed on mobile devices increasing significantly year-on-year, a slow loading mobile website can seriously weaken potential for return on investment, while also resulting in an unsatisfactory customer experience.
 
Commenting on the data, Chief Digital Officer of Core, Aisling Blake said, "With 64% of Irish people accessing search engines via a mobile device at least weekly and 16% purchasing products or services at least weekly on their smartphone, one could rightly assume most Irish brands and companies have their website speed sorted. This is simply not the case."

She added, "Based on the ‘three second rule’, even the best performing group are typically losing over half their mobile site visitors. With over half of the visitors to the websites we examined coming through mobile devices, this puts even more context on the size of the problem."
 
Source: www.businessworld.ie