E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 2

Ari Weil
Learn more about Akamai

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.

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E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 2

Ari Weil
Learn more about Akamai

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.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

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The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

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Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

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