3 Reasons Why E-Commerce Sites Are Slowing Down, and What You Can Do About It

When it comes to website load times, user expectations are constantly escalating. In 1999, the optimal load time was eight seconds. By 2010, 57 percent of online shoppers stated they would abandon a web page after waiting just three seconds for it to load.

While internet users may have high expectations, these expectations aren't being met by most sites. At Radware, we recently tested the load times of the top 500 e-commerce sites and found that the median site took 7.72 seconds to load. This represents a 13.7 percent slowdown since spring 2012.

In other words, a typical contemporary e-commerce site delivers a 1999 user experience. And in countless case studies, ranging from small e-commerce shops to online giants like Amazon.com, this subpar user experience translates to losses in page views, return visits, conversion rate and, ultimately, revenue.

In this article, I'll share a few of the key culprits behind the web performance problem, and how site owners can fight back.

1. Pages are getting bigger and are increasingly dynamic. According to our findings, the median e-commerce homepage is 1095 KB in size and contains 91 resources (e.g., images, JavaScript, CSS files, etc.). For most sites, the biggest drain on performance is the need to complete dozens of network round trips to retrieve all these resources. This is exacerbated by the fact that page resources can be hosted on multiple servers.

What site owners can do to combat this issue:

• Consolidate page resources.
• Compress text and images.
• Minify code.
• Optimize — resize and/or reformat — images.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to cache resources closer to end users.

2. Pages aren't optimized to load key content first. Of the top 100 sites we tested, the median time to interact (TTI) was 4.9 seconds. Time to interact is the point at which a page displays its primary interactive content, and it's an important indicator of a page's ability to deliver a satisfactory user experience (by serving content that the user cares about) and to fulfill the site owner's objective (allowing the user to respond to the page's primary call to action).
Ideally, web pages should be interactive in two seconds or less. Only 8 percent of the sites we tested met this criteria.