The vast majority of British consumers will choose to stop using a site that offers safe shopping online if it is not up to scratch in terms of page load speed, according to a new study from Eggplant.

Seventy five per cent of respondents said that their loyalties had been eroded by this issue in the past, while four out of five said that a sluggish site was higher up the scale of annoyance than one which was completely out of action.

A third of those questioned said that the speed of a site was key to their ability to enjoy using it for shopping online, while under a fifth said that it did not have any relevance in terms of whether or not they had a positive experience.

For sites that are suffering downtime, it seems that the penalties in terms of customer loyalty are a little lower. Around half of consumers said that they would feel a tiny bit disgruntled by an outage; far less than would throw in the towel with a retailer if pages were not loading quickly enough to meet their expectations.

This is just the latest survey to turn the spotlight onto page load speed and raise awareness about the fact that consumers are extremely unlikely to put up with poor performance when visiting any site. If shopping services are offered, then any kind of frustration with the experience, no matter how minor, can be detrimental to the chances of a sale being secured.

Shoppers seem quick to blame the sites themselves, rather than the devices they are using and the speed of the connection that is available to them. But even if this is an unfair stance, it is not something that retailers can overlook when designing their websites.