70.4% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase over a slow or glitchy website
AI does a lot of the shopping legwork now. People ask a chatbot for the best running shoes or a decent espresso grinder, get a shortlist, and click through to buy. The last click still lands on your website, and if your site stalls, people leave.
In September, our Are Websites Dead? survey found that consumers use AI to narrow their options, then visit websites to check the facts before buying. The same survey of 1,008 US consumers also asked the obvious next question: What happens when the website lets them down?
Short version: They don’t wait, they don’t forgive, and they make a judgment call on your entire company based on how your site behaves.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday a few weeks out, here’s what they told us:
7 in 10 shoppers have walked away from a purchase
70.4% of the people we surveyed have abandoned a purchase because a site ran slow or glitched. They found the product. They wanted it. Then the site gave them a reason to stop.
Friction rarely looks dramatic. Product images take a few seconds to load. The cart spins after someone taps “Add.” The payment step throws an error. Each delay hands the buyer a moment to open a new tab, rethink the price, or answer a text and forget about you.
Most of these shoppers won’t email you to complain; they simply won’t show up in your sales report.
A slow site hands buyers right over to your competitors
58.8% say they’re more likely to buy from a competitor when a website feels slow or hard to use. Your competitor sits one search, one AI prompt, or one back-button tap away. A shopper who got your brand name from ChatGPT got three other names in the same answer.
The damage doesn’t stop at one lost order. 61.1% connect the quality of a website with the quality of a company’s products or services. People read a laggy checkout as a preview of how you run everything else. Fair or not, a broken filter on your product grid makes your actual product look worse.
If you run an agency, keep this number handy for the next client who asks why performance work belongs in the budget. Six in ten shoppers judge the product by the site.
Your biggest sales days put the most strain on your site
49.7% of consumers have run into a slowdown or outage during a major shopping event. Nearly half of shoppers have watched a site buckle at the exact moment the store expected its best numbers of the year.
And the fallout lasts longer than the sale: 31.7% say they wouldn’t return to a site that crashed on them. One bad Black Friday costs you the order in the cart, plus the next order, plus the one after that, for close to a third of the people who saw it.
Human shoppers don’t hit your site alone, either. Our infrastructure report, For AI traffic, the average website doesn’t exist, found 84.1% of AI crawler requests land on dynamic pages your cache can’t serve, compared with 18.6% for human visitors. Bots and buyers end up competing for the same server resources, right when you can least afford it.
About the survey
Propeller Insights conducted a national survey of 1,008 US consumers for Kinsta. All figures come from respondents’ own answers.
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