In the spirit (um, no pun intended) of this spooky season, we came up with this set of infographics to illustrate some scary stats around ecommerce performance. Try sharing these with a colleague to see if you can give them a fright. You know, as an alternative to leaving a fake severed hand on their desk. 
At Radware, we recently released one of our most-anticipated reports of the year — our annual State of the Union for Mobile Ecommerce Performance. Today, I want to share the poster-style infographic we created to accompany the report. It offers a great snapshot of our key findings, as well as some background info about mobile commerce in general.
Mobile has never been more crucial to business success than it is right now. More than half of all time spent on retail sites takes place on a mobile device. The average online shopper makes 6.2 visits to a company’s website, using 2.6 devices, before they buy. And just a one-second delay in mobile load times can hurt conversions and cart size by up to 3.5%.
This is why sites need to perform quickly and consistently across all platforms. This is why it’s critical for site owners to have visibility into the real-world mobile performance of their sites. And this is why, every year at Radware, we study the mobile performance of the top 100 ecommerce sites to see how they measure up to user expectations.
Our latest report — the 2014 State of the Union: Mobile Page Speed and Web Performance — is now available for download. Today, I want to share some of our key findings and takeaways…
Every quarter at Radware, we release a new “state of the union” report, with key findings about the web performance of the world’s most popular ecommerce sites.
Every quarter, we find that the median top 100 ecommerce site takes longer to render feature content than it took the previous quarter.
Every quarter, we field the question: But how could this possibly be happening? Networks, browsers, hardware… they’re all getting better, aren’t they?
The answer to this question is: Pages are slower because they’re bigger, fatter, and more complex than ever. Size and complexity comes with a performance price tag, and that price tag gets steeper every year.
In this post, I’m going to walk through a few of the key findings from our latest report. Then I’m going to share a few examples of practices that are responsible for this downward performance trend.
One of the funny things about the latest research we’ve just released at Radware is that, depending on whom I talk with about it, their reaction ranges from “Wow, that’s amazing!” to “You studied what? Why?”
In case you’re in the second camp, let me give a bit of back story…
Autumn is shaping up to be a very full season, so I’m taking advantage of the relative quiet to take a little R&R. I’ll see you back here in September. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of posts that Google Analytics tells me people liked. I hope you like them, too.
We recently released our latest quarterly research into the performance and page composition of the top 500 online retailers. Today, I thought it would be revealing to take a look at the ten fastest sites and the ten slowest sites and see what they have in common, where they differ, and what insights we can derive from this.
For every post I write about performance, there are dozens that I read. Every so often, I read one that makes me clutch my (metaphorical) pearls and wish I’d written it myself. Here’s a batch of recent wish-I’d-written-that posts by people you should be following, if you aren’t already.
Last week, we released our quarterly State of the Union for ecommerce web performance, which, among other things, found that the median top 100 retail site takes 6.2 seconds to render primary content and 10.7 seconds to fully load. We also found that the median page is 1677 KB in size — 67% larger than it was just one year ago, when the median page was 1007 KB.
These findings and more — including Time to Interact and Load Time for the ten fastest sites — are illustrated in this poster-style set of infographics.
Last week, I was extremely fortunate in being able to speak at the annual Shop.org Online Merchandising Workshop. In the performance community, we so often find ourselves preaching to the converted: to each other, to developers, and to others who focus on the under-the-hood aspect of web performance. Attending this Shop.org event was a fantastic chance to talk with a completely different group of professionals — people in marketing and ecommerce — in other words, people who govern much of the high-level strategy and day-to-day decision-making that happens at retail sites.
When attending other speakers’ sessions, it was gratifying to see performance bubble up as a recurring theme. It was obvious to me that there’s an emerging sense of interest and urgency around performance. The tricky part is ensuring that performance gets its share of mental real estate among a group of professionals who are clearly already burdened with a massive set of challenges in the increasingly complex ecommerce space.