According to a November, 2012 study from IBM, one in four visits to a US retail site now comes from a smartphone. By 2015, more than 60 percent of North American visits to e-commerce sites will come from smartphones. Customers are using mobile phones more and more, and they want more and more out of that experience – but most importantly, they want it fast.

“People think about the mobile device as being like the land device in terms of how it should perform,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO and Co-Founder, Akamai Technologies. “There shouldn’t be any difference from their perspective.”

Of the 30 top performing land-connected sites, the typical load time is two seconds, and all 30 of them are using Akamai to make the site fast. In comparison, the top 30 performing mobile sites take nine seconds to load, despite the fact that consumers expect their mobile sites to load in five seconds or less.

In the below presentation, Dr. Leighton discusses how companies can balance the increasing weight of sites due to enriched content and more of it, with an increasing demand for speed from consumers.