Websites for the top 100 U.S. retailers continue to slow down–falling about 27% in the past year, according to a new report from Radware. The new report titled, “State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Summer 2014," indicates that site owners
who do not implement core best practices critically affect overall website performance and customer experience.
Radware’s latest study reveals that, of the top 100 retail websites, the median page has grown 67% in just one year and many are failing to leverage advanced techniques to help accelerate their pages. The report shows that the use of images is one of the top performance drains, as most site owners are not taking advantage of image optimization techniques that can dramatically improve both real and perceived load times.
What’s more, website performance degradation continues to escalate as retail web pages grow larger and more complex. The median top 100 ecommerce home page takes six seconds or longer to render its primary content to online visitors–a 27% slowdown in the past year. This render time is more than twice as slow as the ideal user experience of three seconds or less. Only 14% of the top 100 retail sites were able to deliver an optimal user experience while 17% took 10 or more seconds just to be become interactive.
“We’re so accustomed to expecting to see high-quality images everywhere on the web that we take them for granted and don’t think about their heavy performance impact,” Kent Alstad, vice president of acceleration for Radware, said in a release. “Page size has a direct impact on page speed, and images comprise at least half a typical page’s weight. As such, they represent an extremely fertile ground for optimization. Yet, we found that many leading retailers are not taking advantage of techniques such as image compression and progressive image rendering, which can enhance both load times and user experience."
Here are some other key takeaways from the report:
· Websites are getting slower … fast: In just one year, median time to interact (TTI) has slowed down by 27% (from 4.9 seconds to 6.2 seconds), and median load time has suffered a 49% increase (from 7.2 seconds to 10.7 seconds).
· Page size and complexity are major factors in this performance breakdown: The median page has grown by 67% in just one year–from 1007 KB in Summer 2013 to 1677 KB now. In 2013, the median page contained 82 resource requests. Today, the median page contains 100 requests. Much of this growth in size and complexity is due to the proliferation of poorly optimized images and third-
party scripts (e.g. page analytics, tracking beacons, and social buttons).
· Site owners are missing clear opportunities to better optimize their pages: Most sites have implemented fundamental performance practices, but many are failing to leverage more advanced techniques, and missing out on valuable opportunities to acceleratetheir pages. While 96% of sites enable “keepalives” (a technique that allows TCP connections to remain open longer, thereby reducing the time spent re-opening connections) and 78% use a content delivery network to cache page resources closer to end users (thereby shortening server round trips and speeding up rendering time), most sites failed to properly implement image optimization techniques, such as compression and progressive JPEGs.
· Many sites are making the same three mistakes, which ultimately hurt the user experience: A surprising number of sites experience the same recurring performance/usability problems, including delayed rendering and pop-ups that interrupt page render.
Radware’s quarterly “State of the Union” report measures and tracks the performance and page composition of the top 500 U.S. retail websites (as ranked by analytics firm Alexa.com) with the purpose of gaining ongoing visibility into the real-world performance of leading ecommerce sites. The study also aims to learn how these sites perform for visitors using the Internet under normal browsing conditions and provides strategies and best practices to enable site owners to enhance site performance.