Integrated application delivery and application security solutions firm Radware has recently released its latest 'State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance" study.
The findings reveal a 49% increase in the time it takes for home pages of the top 100 retail websites to load. Today, the median load time of a top ecommerce home page is 10.7 seconds, up from 7.2 seconds just one year ago.
The median time to interact has also slowed. In one year the time it takes for a retailer's home page to become interactive has slowed 27% - from 4.9 seconds to 6.2 seconds.
Page size and their complexity are both behind the slowdown, says Radware.
"The median page has grown by 67% in just one year - from 1007 KB in Summer 2013 to 1677 KB now," writes Tammy Everts, web performance evangelist and senior researcher at Radware, on the company blog. "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)."