Optimizing online web performance is critical to keep and convert customers and achieve success for the holidays and the entire retail year. Akamai's The State of Online Retail Performance report lays out the challenges online retailers face.
Start with E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 1
Mobile Users Bounce Around
As noted above, half of the online shoppers browse for products and services on their mobile devices. And of those, more than half are going to bounce. The stickiest consumers are on tablets, where the bounce rate averages 40.6 percent. Desktop users fall in the middle, with a 43 percent bounce rate. Unfortunately, losing up to half of your visitors is the harsh reality of online commerce. Consumers aren't patient, and they are only one back-button click from Google search results and competitors' websites.
A one-second delay can bump the bounce rate by almost 50 percent on mobile, and a two-second delay more than doubles it. Mobile users seem to be the most sensitive ones, but the impacts are similar with delays on desktop and tablet. If you are acquiring customers through search engine marketing campaigns, then these user bounce rates mean you not only missed the chance to show these customers your products, but you also paid a per-click price just to have the user leave the page before it even finished loading.
An efficient and effective strategy for minimizing bounce rate is to be visually complete as quickly as possible and load important page elements above the fold first. Once users can see and interact with the page, they assume the page is loaded even if other elements or third-party scripts are still loading in the background.
A start-render measurement is often the metric tracked here to demonstrate the point in time when something was displayed on the screen. A maximum start-render time of 0.9 seconds on desktop, 1.3 seconds on mobile, and 1.5 seconds on tablets corresponds to the lowest bounce rate on each device.
Third-Party Scripts
When it comes to providing a fast and seamless experience, less is often more. By reducing the number of page elements on a page and by utilizing the least amount of third-party scripts, one can provide the best page performance. But we also should keep in mind the entire customer experience. For example, we know that consumers convert at a higher level on personalized pages, and personalization usually requires third-party scripts. So, should one remove all third-party scripts and give consumers a Google like search page? Probably not. If third-party scripts are used to appropriately improve the customer experience and are loaded asynchronously, they can increase conversion.
Interestingly, the highest-converting desktop and tablet pages contained 20–25 third-party scripts, and the best-converting mobile pages contained 15–20. This is consistent with a joint machine learning project conducted by Akamai and Google which found that user sessions that converted contained 48 percent more scripts than sessions that did not.
That said, those scripts should be used judiciously and optimized well; simply throwing more scripts on the page will certainly not help conversion. Before adding elements to a page, retailers should always ask – what customer struggle point does this address or how does this improve the customer experience? If the answer to these questions is none, then perhaps that new element is not a priority item to add to the page.
Holiday Preparedness Starts Now
The Akamai study offers a lot of data to parse. But what is the real bottom line for online retailers?
Optimize for mobile — its influence on sales is only going to increase.
Monitor your site all the time to spot poorly-performing pages so you don't leave money on the table.
Run load tests before peak traffic times based on real user traffic patterns.
Prioritize customer experience and remove unnecessary third-party tags.
Implement a robust caching and content delivery strategy to ensure uptime and scalability.
Holiday shopping and promotion start earlier every year, so you can't wait until November 22. Start now, be thorough, and make it the best online year ever.
The Latest
One common infrastructure challenge arises with virtual private networks (VPNs). VPNs have long been relied upon to deliver the network connectivity and security enterprises required at a price they could afford. Organizations still routinely turn to them to provide internal and trusted third-parties with "secure" remote access to isolated networks. However, with the rise in mobile, IoT, multi- and hybrid-cloud, as well as edge computing, traditional enterprise perimeters are extending and becoming blurred ...
The configuration management database (CMDB), along with its more federated companion, the configuration management system (CMS), has been bathed in a deluge of negative opinions from all fronts — industry experts, vendors, and IT professionals. But from what recent EMA research on analytics, ITSM performance and other areas is indicating, those negative views seem to be missing out on a real undercurrent of truth — that CMDB/CMS alignments, whatever their defects, strongly skew to success in terms of overall IT progressiveness and effectiveness ...
The on-demand economy has transformed the way we move around, eat, learn, travel and connect at a massive scale. However, with disruption and big aspirations comes big, complex challenges. To take these challenges head-on, on-demand economy companies are finding new ways to deliver their services and products to an audience with ever-increasing expectations, and that's what we'll look at in this blog ...
To thrive in today's highly competitive digital business landscape, organizations must harness their "digital DNA." In other words, they need to connect all of their systems and databases — including various business applications, devices, big data and any instances of IoT and hybrid cloud environments — so they're accessible and actionable. By integrating all existing components and new technologies, organizations can gain a comprehensive, trusted view of their business functions, thereby enabling more agile deployment processes and ensuring scalable growth and relevance over the long-term ...
Advancements in technology innovation are happening so quickly, the decision of where and when to transform can be a moving target for businesses. When done well, digital transformation improves the customer experience while optimizing operational efficiency. To get there, enterprises must encourage experimentation to overcome organizational obstacles. In other words ...
IoT adoption is growing rapidly, and respondents believe 30% of their company’s revenue two years from now will be due to IoT, according to the new IoT Signals report from Microsoft Corp ...
It's been all over the news the last few months. After two fatal crashes, Boeing was forced to ground its 737. The doomed model is now undergoing extensive testing to get it back into service and production. Large organizations often tell stakeholders that even though all software goes through extensive testing, this type of thing “just happens.” But that is exactly the problem. While the human component of application development and testing won't go away, it can be eased and supplemented by far more efficient and automated methods to proactively determine software health and identify flaws ...
Despite significant investment in AI, many companies are still struggling to stabilize and scale their AI initiatives, according to State of Development and Operations of AI Applications 2019 from Dotscience ...
IT has two principal functions: create a network that satisfies the business needs of the company and then optimize that network. Unfortunately, the modern enterprise is buried under a myriad of network improvement projects that often do not get deployed ...
Even large companies are not yet realizing the potential of digital transformation, according to a new study from Cherwell Software, The Power of Process Integration in the Information Age ...
