So many factors go into making a website successful, it sometimes makes you wonder if it is just good old fashion luck, but it is not. Optimizing a website requires people that know what they are doing to get the traffic you need for your particular niche. While many of the intangible metrics are hard to figure out, optimization techniques to improve the performance of a website have been proven to deliver results that increase traffic and customer satisfaction. The new quarterly study by Radware, provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, titled "State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Summer 2014" has revealed top retail websites are failing to optimize their pages.
Radware said the top 100 retail websites have increased their median page by 67 percent in the past years, but many are not implementing solutions that are readily available to accelerate their pages.
The size of pages has grown from 1,007 KB in the summer 2013 to 1,677 KB today. Having large pages that are not optimized with third party scripts, page analytics, tracking beacons and social media buttons is slowing the performance of websites. The median time to interact (TTI) has slowed down by 27 percent from 4.9 seconds to 6.2 seconds, with the median load time going from 7.2 seconds to 10.7 seconds, a 49 percent increase.
The report said one of the single performance drains is the use of images, which are being used without being optimized. Although websites have been using traditional performance practices, they are missing opportunities by not taking advantage of the advanced techniques. Many sites are failing to properly implement optimization techniques, such as compression and progressive JPEGs.
The growth of performance degradation is also growing as retail web pages become more complicated. This has slowed down the time it takes to render the primary pages of the median top 100 ecommerce home page to six or more seconds, a 27 percent slowdown in the past year. Radware stated this is twice the rate of the ideal user experience of three seconds or less. While only 14 percent of the top retail sites deliver the optimal experience for its users, 17 percent took 10 or more seconds 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. 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," says Kent Alstad, vice president of acceleration for Radware.
Radware conducted the test on June 11, 2014 using WebPagetest, which simulates page load times from a real user's perspective using real browsers. The median test result for each home page was recorded and used in its calculation.