A new study from Mobify has found that in spite of the rise of safe shopping online taking place on smartphones and tablets, many e-commerce sites are still not adequately optimised for visitors using portable devices.

Internet Retailing reports that page load speed is the biggest obstacle to a smooth experience at the moment, with stats from Google indicating that just over half of web users will terminate their visit to a site if the page they click through to is not up and running in three seconds.

Study spokesperson, Amanda Naso, said that there was a clear distinction between UK consumers and shoppers in the US when it comes to harnessing the power of mobiles for making purchases. It has already been three years since Brits pushed portable devices ahead of traditional PCs in the site visit stakes, while this was only achieved in America in 2017.

Unfortunately the fact that just a tenth of the sites that were covered in the research were able to load in under 3.1 seconds means that plenty of people will be disappointed when they try to carry out shopping online on their handset of choice.

The most common page load time seen across the sites assessed was six seconds, which is fairly sluggish by modern standards and could mean that many retailers are losing sales that they could capture if they tuned up their infrastructures.

The problem is that there are lots of variables which hold sway over how quickly a page loads on a portable device, especially if it is using cell coverage rather than local Wi-Fi. However there are still things that sites can do to optimise themselves, rather than leaving it up to chance and hoping that visitors are satisfied.