Problem:
One needs to analyze the motives that visitors might have in visiting a website, the psychological and physical effects that delays and outages might have etc.
Studies have concluded that "performance remains a major factor for keeping visitors coming back to a site" (Akamai, 2009).
Although the UK tax website might crash on occasion - this does not put off visitors as they have to file their returns online if they have not sent them in on paper by the end of September!
QUESTION: What are your thoughts on this?
NOTE: One major point that I would like to know about this question is whether the link between and site abandonment and performance is only for retail or e-commerce sites.
Reference:
Akamai (2009) Akamai Reveals 2 Seconds as the New Threshold of Acceptability for eCommerce Web Page Response Times [Online]. Available from:
https://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_091409.html (Accessed: 18 August 2011).