Four seconds to convince someone that your website is worth visiting. That’s all you have according to research conducted by JupiterResearch on behalf of Akamai Technologies, the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online.

And we are not talking a verbal four second plea either. We are talking page load times.

If your web page does not load within four seconds, chances are your visitor is going to go elsewhere. I know myself that if a website takes longer than that to load I’m hot for hanging about. Another website - maybe your competitor’s website - is but a click away.

Worst offenders in my book are home pages that feature some form of promotional video that takes forever to load, throws up error messages or “you need to download software before viewing” messages and then is of no interest anyway. And it is of even less interest the next time you visit the site and have to endure the same nonsense.

This shouldn’t really be news though. Remember boo.com? The fashion website went bust after spending millions on a website that was simply far too slow and cumbersome to use, particularly in the days when broadband just wasn’t available.

Anyway, here’s the top ten things that visitors DO want to find when visiting websites, and in particular retail websites, in order of importance according to the report.

1. Site is easy to navigate

2. Assurances of information security

3. Ease of registration /check-out / log-in

4. Pictures / videos of product details

5. Pages easy to read / not confusing

6. Rapid checkout process

7. Search function works well

8. Pages load quickly

9. Recommendations based on past purchases

10. Personalised e-mail offers
Looking at that list, I would make the top eight a priority for every retail website that you are responsible for (personally, a rapid check-out process would be much higher up my own list of things I want when buying online).

Traffic is what will decide the fate of your internet based ventures. Getting someone to your site is half the battle, but you then have to turn that visitor into a customer and then a repeat customer. Get those first four seconds right and then make sure the rest of your website’s user experience stacks up and you should be able to do just that time after time.