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Web Performance on the Decline

leading ecommerce sites not meeting performance demands of online consumers
Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Websites for the top 500 US retailers continue to slow down, a 13.7% drop since Spring 2012 ...

Websites for the top 500 US retailers continue to slow down, a 13.7% drop since Spring 2012, according to a new study by Radware, State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Summer 2013.

Findings indicate that site owners who do not implement core best practices, critically affect website performance and customer experience.

For the report, Radware tested the website performance of the top 500 US retail websites (as ranked by analytics firm Alexa.com) over a two-week period.

Key findings from the study:

- Web pages continue to slow down. The median load time is 7.72 seconds, a slowdown of 13.7% since Spring 2012.

- The median page is 1,095 KB and contains 91 resources (images, JavaScript, CSS files, etc.). This represents 8% growth since Spring 2012.

- Adoption of performance best practices has either plateaued or is on the decline. Site owners who neglect core best practices miss out on the opportunity to make relatively easy performance gains.

- Across all three major browsers, performance has either plateaued or is trending downward. Browser vendors are challenged to keep pace with the demands of today’s large, complex, dynamic web pages.

Additionally, the report revealed that the median time to interact (TTI) is 4.9 seconds. TTI is the point at which a page displays its primary interactive content (e.g., feature banners with functional call-to-action buttons). Of the top 100 e-commerce sites tested, only 8% of the top 100 sites had a sub-2-second TTI, while 9% had a TTI time of eight or more seconds.

“These findings are startling – retailers still don’t realize that they are losing customers by neglecting core best practices,” said Tammy Everts, web performance evangelist, Radware. “Fifty-seven percent of consumers will abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Web pages need to work smarter and harder. Site owners not only need to adopt core best practices, but also utilize advanced techniques that optimize the browser’s efficiency.”

Report Methodology

Website load tests were conducted over a two-week period – June 24 to July 5, 2013 – using Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 21 and Chrome 27 on a DSL connection. The tests in this study were performed using WebPagetest.org, an open source project primarily developed by Google, which simulates page load times from a real user’s perspective. Radware tested the home page of every site nine times in the Alexa Retail 500.

In addition to measuring a core set of metrics – load time, resource requests, page size and implementation of core performance best practices – the set of tests marks the inauguration of a new metric for the report: time to interact (TTI). TTI is considered to be a more meaningful indicator of a page’s ability to deliver a satisfactory user experience to a visitor, providing additional insight into real-user performance. To identify the TTI for each page, Radware generated timed filmstrip views of the page load for the median page for each site in the Alexa Retail 100.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Web Performance on the Decline

leading ecommerce sites not meeting performance demands of online consumers
Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Websites for the top 500 US retailers continue to slow down, a 13.7% drop since Spring 2012 ...

Websites for the top 500 US retailers continue to slow down, a 13.7% drop since Spring 2012, according to a new study by Radware, State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Summer 2013.

Findings indicate that site owners who do not implement core best practices, critically affect website performance and customer experience.

For the report, Radware tested the website performance of the top 500 US retail websites (as ranked by analytics firm Alexa.com) over a two-week period.

Key findings from the study:

- Web pages continue to slow down. The median load time is 7.72 seconds, a slowdown of 13.7% since Spring 2012.

- The median page is 1,095 KB and contains 91 resources (images, JavaScript, CSS files, etc.). This represents 8% growth since Spring 2012.

- Adoption of performance best practices has either plateaued or is on the decline. Site owners who neglect core best practices miss out on the opportunity to make relatively easy performance gains.

- Across all three major browsers, performance has either plateaued or is trending downward. Browser vendors are challenged to keep pace with the demands of today’s large, complex, dynamic web pages.

Additionally, the report revealed that the median time to interact (TTI) is 4.9 seconds. TTI is the point at which a page displays its primary interactive content (e.g., feature banners with functional call-to-action buttons). Of the top 100 e-commerce sites tested, only 8% of the top 100 sites had a sub-2-second TTI, while 9% had a TTI time of eight or more seconds.

“These findings are startling – retailers still don’t realize that they are losing customers by neglecting core best practices,” said Tammy Everts, web performance evangelist, Radware. “Fifty-seven percent of consumers will abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Web pages need to work smarter and harder. Site owners not only need to adopt core best practices, but also utilize advanced techniques that optimize the browser’s efficiency.”

Report Methodology

Website load tests were conducted over a two-week period – June 24 to July 5, 2013 – using Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 21 and Chrome 27 on a DSL connection. The tests in this study were performed using WebPagetest.org, an open source project primarily developed by Google, which simulates page load times from a real user’s perspective. Radware tested the home page of every site nine times in the Alexa Retail 500.

In addition to measuring a core set of metrics – load time, resource requests, page size and implementation of core performance best practices – the set of tests marks the inauguration of a new metric for the report: time to interact (TTI). TTI is considered to be a more meaningful indicator of a page’s ability to deliver a satisfactory user experience to a visitor, providing additional insight into real-user performance. To identify the TTI for each page, Radware generated timed filmstrip views of the page load for the median page for each site in the Alexa Retail 100.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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