TMCNet: Q1's Fastest Ecommerce Desktop Websites: How Did They Achieve It?

[May 16, 2016]

Q1's Fastest Ecommerce Desktop Websites: How Did They Achieve It?

Catchpoint Systems, a digital performance analytics company, has released its Ecommerce Web Performance Benchmark report for the first quarter of 2016, ranking desktop websites based on their performance (speed or load time). Target, Apple (News - Alert) and Walgreens were the fastest sites, attributing much of their success to performance-enhancing practices any size web business can use. Key results include:

  • The top three webpage load time performers were Target (News - Alert) (1.03 seconds), Apple (1.38 seconds) and Walgreens (1.45 seconds). The rest of the top ten included Systemax (1.66 seconds), Best Buy (1.72 seconds), Staples (1.73 seconds), Costco (1.73 seconds), The Home Depot (1.81 seconds), Amway (1.83 seconds), and Dell (News - Alert) (1.91 seconds).
  • There continues to be a direct correlation between lighter page weight and faster webpage load times. The median webpage load time for pages with average size up to 2 MB was 2.25 seconds; between 2 to 4 MB, 3.39 seconds; and more than 4 MB, 3.78 seconds. All of the top 10 fastest websites had page weights under 2 MB, with the exception of one (Costco).

Measurements for this benchmark were taken from 27 Catchpoint backbone monitoring nodes located across the United States, at intervals of two minutes, with results collated into an average webpage load time for each ecommerce site. Webpage load time is defined as the time it takes for enough page elements to load for an end user to begin interacting with a page.

"The top ten companies should be commended for applying tools and techniques that deliver web content faster and maintain strong user perceptions," says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and Co-founder, Catchpoint Systems. "Attention spans are getting shorter, and for ecommerce sites, even a few milliseconds of performance improvement can increase revenues. Fortunately, any website can afford to institute the same practices used by the performance leades."

Common Characteristics of Winners: Besides keeping page weights low, the top performers in this benchmark shared several other common characteristics:

  • All used CDNs to deliver static content, allowing them to achieve a high degree of performance consistency across geographies.
  • Most relied on very few external third-party services; Apple featured only one. These services, such as social media plug-ins, video and analytics, are intended to enrich the user experience, but can have the unintended consequence of increasing performance risk, as a single slow or stalled service can degrade the performance for an entire site.
  • The top ten sites used techniques to minimize the performance impact of webpage elements that can load slowly. One technique is asynchronous loading, which "skips" over slow-loading elements, allowing the core site information to load first. The result is the user perception of a fast load is preserved.

Room for Improvement: An analysis of the practices deployed by the top ten reveals that there are still simple performance-enhancing techniques being ignored. One such technique is image optimization. One website used Gzip to compress PNG images which is not a recommended practice, because it does not reduce PNG file sizes. In the course of Catchpoint's measurements, another top ten website moved its JavaScript to load right at the top, which negatively impacted webpage load time.

"In spite of the gains many ecommerce companies have made, web performance must always be considered a work in progress," continues Daoudi. "Every day, internet industry leaders are setting an ever-higher bar for speed and raising user expectations in the process. Companies that don't keep up will endanger customer loyalty and positive brand awareness."

The full Catchpoint Q1-2016 Ecommerce Web Performance Benchmark Report can be downloaded here: http://pages.catchpoint.com/eComm-Q1-2016-US-Benchmark-RPT.html

About Catchpoint Systems

Catchpoint Systems is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into your customer-critical services to help you consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously capture, index, and analyze object-level performance data inline across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage, enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service delivery. More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brands and grow their businesses. To request a free trial, visit www.catchpoint.com/freetrial.


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