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

What site owners can do:

• Defer rendering "below the fold" page content.
• Ensure that interactive features (e.g., carousels) are optimized to load early and quickly.
• Defer loading and executing nonessential scripts, such as third-party analytics, social widgets and ads.
• Use AJAX for progressive enhancement.

3. Adoption of performance best practices has either plateaued or is on the decline. While the adoption of some fundamental performance best practices (e.g., use a CDN, enable keep-alives) remains widespread, the adoption rate has plateaued. For other best practices (e.g., compress text and images), adoption is still lagging.

These findings are consistent with separate findings, recently announced by Google performance evangelist Steve Souders, who stated, "the adoption of performance best practices has been flat or trending down." Souders also points out that we're seeing declining numbers in the adoption of core techniques such as optimizing header caching and avoiding redirects.

What site owners can do:

• Use a CDN. CDN use has plateaued at 58 percent despite the fact that most, if not all, major retail sites could benefit from using one.
• Enable keep-alives and compression. These are simple best practices — the low-hanging fruit on the performance optimization tree — but they can have a huge impact on page speed, making pages load up to 30 percent faster.
• Create/maintain focus on front-end web performance optimization (WPO) via manual WPO performed by in-house developers, automated WPO solutions or a combination of the two.

Tammy Everts is solution evangelist at Radware, where she evangelizes web performance both in-house and out in the world.