Application Acceleration & Optimization

At Radware, we care about making our customers’ websites and web-based applications as secure, fast, and reliable as possible. When I go to conferences and events, this is the lens through which I view every session I attend and every conversation I have. Earlier this month, I had the privilege of being invited to lead a round table at the annual Shop.org Summit in Seattle. The Summit is one of the largest and most important ecommerce conferences in the world. If you work in the online retail space, it’s a must-attend event. As always, I learned at least as much as I shared with others. Here are my top six takeaways.

Cyber Monday is just around the corner, and early predictions point to holiday ecommerce sales hitting an all-time record of $72 billion. But retailers know that competition for this ecommerce spend will also be at an all-time high. Many will leverage aggressive strategies, ranging from rich visuals to geo-targeting campaigns, to earn their share of the holiday retail pie. These strategies, however, can come with a significant performance price tags, making pages slow to render -- and ultimately driving away consumers. Today at Radware, we've released our latest research into the performance of the world's most popular ecommerce sites. Our research answers the question: Is the fight to offer shoppers the richest possible content helping or hurting the user experience?

Mobile used to take the backseat to desktop, but no longer. One out of four people worldwide own a smartphone, and at least 55% of all time spent on retail sites takes place on mobile devices. These numbers are why we've decided to release our annual state of the union for mobile web performance on the same day as our quarterly desktop state of the union. In this post, I'll walk through a high-level summary of our key findings, including statistics around load times, website fragmentation, and mobile performance challenges.

Selecting the best image rendering format is the first step on the path toward fully optimized images, but even this first step is fraught with debate. At the core of the debate is this seemingly simple question: Should we use baseline or progressive images? If you're not a web designer or developer, you might find yourself wondering if this is really a crucial question. But if you are a designer or developer, you're aware that this question has major ramifications in terms of creating the best possible user experience. At Radware, our latest research explores this important user experience issue and yields answers that are supported by real data.

When we conducted our latest quarterly research into the performance of the top 500 retail websites, we weren't completely surprised to learn that many of the top retailers are making the same set of design decisions that ultimately hurt web performance. The good news is that these mistakes represent excellent "low-hanging fruit" opportunities to optimize their pages.

Our latest research into the performance and page composition of top retail sites finds that a typical ecommerce page takes 6.2 seconds to render its primary content, 10.7 seconds to fully load, and weighs in at 1677 KB. Keep reading to find out what this means for site owners who care about delivering the best possible user experience to their customers.

Google recently announced changes to Googlebot that some people speculate could pave the way for the web crawler to gather more nuanced performance metrics for the sites it crawls -- and ultimately make performance a more critical ranking factor. This seems like a good time to review and update our FAQ on Google, page speed, and search engine optimization.

One of the most provocative findings in our latest State of the Union for Ecommerce Web Performance was the fact that using a content delivery network correlated to slower performance for retail sites. In today's post, we'll explore what this finding means (hint: correlation doesn't mean causation) and why you still need a CDN in your performance toolkit.

A typical leading ecommerce website takes longer to render than it did just three months ago, top sites are slower than the rest of the pack, and sites that use a content delivery network (CDN) are slower than sites that do not. These are just a few of the findings detailed in our latest research into the performance of the top 500 retail sites.

There are a handful of assumptions that frequently come up when we read and talk about mobile performance. Today, I want to review the most common myths, discuss why they persist, and explain why they are incorrect.

If you go looking for case studies that prove the business value of improving website performance, chances are you’ll encounter a number of studies that focus on obvious ecommerce metrics like cart size and sales. But there are a number of other ways that improving performance can move other business metrics. Today, I want to highlight a few of these metrics using some customer case studies.

Our newest quarterly performance state of the union, released earlier this week, analyzes the load time of the top 500 ecommerce sites and compares their current performance to their performance one year ago. Among other things, we learned that the median web page takes 9.3 seconds to load -- a 21% slowdown in the past twelve months.