Website speed issues drove 70.4% to abandon purchases
Website speed issues have caused 70.4% of surveyed US consumers to abandon a purchase, according to research conducted by Propeller Insights for Kinsta. The national survey covered 1,008 consumers, and Kinsta published the findings on October 14, 2026, shortly before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Because the figures come from respondents' own answers, they represent reported experiences and intentions rather than directly observed transactions.
The results build on Kinsta's September survey, titled Are Websites Dead?, which examined how people use artificial intelligence (AI), software that can answer questions and recommend products, while shopping. Respondents said they use AI to narrow their choices, then visit company websites to verify information before buying. This means the website still handles a decisive part of the journey even when an AI service helped the shopper discover the product.
A slow or unreliable site can interrupt that final step. The 70.4% who reported abandoning a purchase because a website was slow or glitchy had already reached the point of considering or attempting a transaction. The problem does not have to be a complete failure. Kinsta highlighted product images that take several seconds to appear, an unresponsive cart after a shopper selects an item, and errors during payment as examples of friction that can stop a sale. Many affected shoppers will not contact the business, so their experience may appear only as a missing order rather than a complaint.
The competitive effect was also clear in the responses. 58.8% said they were more likely to buy from a competitor when a website felt slow or difficult to use. That choice may be especially easy after an AI service or search result has already presented several possible sellers. A visitor can move elsewhere with another search, prompt or use of the browser's back button.
Website performance also influenced broader perceptions of the business. 61.1% associated website quality with the quality of a company's products or services. In practice, respondents were not treating a slow checkout or broken product filter as an isolated technical problem. They were using the experience as evidence when judging the company itself. For agencies, that finding gives performance work a commercial context: about six in ten respondents connected the condition of the website with what the business sells.
Peak shopping events create an additional reliability test. The survey found that 49.7% of consumers had experienced a slowdown or outage, meaning a period when a website becomes unavailable, during a major shopping event. The longer-term effect may extend beyond the interrupted order. 31.7% said they would not return to a site that had crashed on them, indicating that a failure during a major sale can affect future visits as well as the transaction already in progress.
Automated traffic may add to the load during these busy periods. Kinsta cited a separate infrastructure report, For AI traffic, the average website doesn't exist, which found that 84.1% of AI crawler requests reached dynamic pages, meaning pages assembled when they are requested, that a cache could not serve. A cache is a stored, ready-to-deliver copy of website content that reduces the work needed to answer a request. The comparable proportion for human visitors was 18.6%. An AI crawler is an automated program that visits web pages to collect information. Kinsta's interpretation is that crawlers and shoppers can therefore compete for the same server resources when traffic is already high.
For site owners, the findings support testing the whole buying path rather than checking only whether the home page opens. Product images, filters, the add-to-cart action and payment should be reviewed before a major campaign, while outages and slowdowns should be monitored as the event takes place. Businesses should also ask whoever manages their hosting to review whether automated crawler traffic is reaching resource-intensive dynamic pages. For WordPress operators who do not want to manage the hosting layer themselves, AEU Hosting provides managed WordPress hosting secured end to end.
The survey does not measure every buyer or every website, but its results show that respondents frequently treat site performance as part of the product experience. AI may help people create a shortlist, yet the merchant's own website still has to present the details, keep the cart responsive and complete the payment without interruption. When it fails at that point, the reported consequences include abandoned purchases, movement to competitors and a reduced willingness to return.