Software firm Radware has announced the release of its latest quarterly study titled "State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Summer 2014."
According to the company, of the top 100 retail websites, the median page has grown 67 percent in just one year and many are failing to leverage advanced techniques to help accelerate their pages. The report finds that use of images is one of the single biggest performance drains, as most site owners are not taking advantage of image optimization techniques that can dramatically improve both real and perceived load times.
Radware also found that performance degradation continues to escalate as retail web pages grow larger and more complex. The median top 100 e-commerce home page takes six seconds or longer to render its primary content to online visitors — a 27 percent slowdown over the past year. This render time is more than twice as slow as the ideal user experience of three seconds or less. Only 14 percent of the top 100 retail sites were able to deliver an optimal user experience; 17 percent took ten or more seconds just to be become interactive.
Other key findings from the report include:
Websites are getting slower…fast.
In just one year, median time to interact (TTI) has slowed down by 27 percent (from 4.9 seconds to 6.2 seconds), and median load time has suffered a 49 percent increase (from 7.2 seconds to 10.7 seconds).
Page size and complexity are major factors in this performance slowdown.
The median page has grown by 67 percent in just one year — from 1,007 KB in Summer 2013 to 1,677 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 accelerate their pages.
While 96 percent of sites enable "keepalives" (a technique that allows TCP connections to remain open longer, thereby reducing the time spent re-opening connections) and 78 percent 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.