What’s the price of a second?
When Amazon.com went down for 20 minutes earlier this month, it cost the ecommerce giant an estimated $3.75 million – $3,125 per second.
Many other sites are leaving money on the table even when their sites are fully operational. The 2016 State of the Union: Multi-Industry Web Performance (Desktop Edition) found that most travel, news, and sports sites fail one of the most fundamental tests of web performance: load time.
It’s not just ecommerce sites, either: for this quarter’s State of the Union Report, we decided to look at the top 50 websites of four key industries to see what web performance bottlenecks were prevalent, and we learned quite a bit in analyzing news, travel and sports sites, along with ecommerce.
Mobile devices travel the world with us. Whether we’re flying, taking the train or doing the old-fashioned road trip, our smartphones are almost always within reach – if not in hand – and we take them to theme parks, hotels and Grandma’s house.
It was inevitable: travelers are utilizing their smartphones to research and make arrangements for their trips, as smartphone and data network penetration continues its inexorable climb toward establishing a truly “mobile-first” world.
As the weather turns and the leaves reveal their polychromatic wonder, I enter this time of year knowing that the holiday season is upon us. Holidays means shopping and like any good technologist, I have transitioned to making most of my holiday purchases online.
As an online retailer (e-tailer), the holiday season is critical to the success of the business. Estimates suggest that on average, over 23% of online sales are made during this time. The stability and availability of the online platform these next couple months can make or break the business. So, what do you do if your online store becomes too popular?
Online retailers are leaving millions of dollars – yes, millions – on the table. Why is this?
In the hyper-competitive world of online commerce sites, every second is absolutely critical in ensuring a user experience that will yield the maximum likelihood of conversion, meaning a site visitor follows through and makes a purchase.
Every year, the shopping cart abandonment rate climbs during the holiday season, with analysts expecting to see a peak of 88% in 2013. An estimated one out of five of those carts are abandoned due to slow performance. This post outlines how much retailers lose due to slow checkout pages, four common performance culprits, and what site owners can do to speed up the transaction process for their customers.
Why exactly do we crave a faster online experience? Is this craving learned or acquired? And to what degree, if any, can it be overcome?
Ecommerce web pages are 22% slower than they were in 2012, top retailers are under performing the rest of the pack, and browser development is not keeping pace with the increasing size and complexity of modern web pages. These were among the findings of our quarterly performance benchmarking report, released today: State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance [Spring 2013].
