STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance

Fall 2014

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................................... 3
The Goal of This Report: Gain a Valuable Shoppers Eye View of Your Website...................................................... 4

Key findings............................................................................................................................................................. 4

Finding 1: The Median Page Takes 6.5 Seconds to Render Feature Content.............................................................. 6
Finding 2: The Median Page Has Slowed Down by 23% in One Year.......................................................................... 6
Finding 3: The Median Page Has Grown by 19% in One Year...................................................................................... 7
5 Common Performance Culprits.................................................................................................................................. 7

Performance Culprit #1: Images............................................................................................................................. 7

Performance Culprit #2: Stylesheets...................................................................................................................... 7

Performance Culprit #3: Custom Fonts.................................................................................................................. 8

Performance Culprit #4: Third-Party Scripts.......................................................................................................... 8

Performance Culprit #5: Responsive Web Design................................................................................................. 9

Finding 4: Adoption of Performance Best Practices Remains Inconsistent................................................................. 9

Enable Keep-Alives................................................................................................................................................. 9

Use a CDN............................................................................................................................................................... 9

Compress Images.................................................................................................................................................. 10

14 Best Practices to Cure Your Web Sites Performance Pains.................................................................................. 11

1. Consolidate JavaScript and CSS....................................................................................................................... 11

2. Minify Code........................................................................................................................................................ 11

3. Enable Keep-Alives............................................................................................................................................ 11

4. Compress Text .................................................................................................................................................. 11

5. Sprite Images..................................................................................................................................................... 11

6. Compress Images.............................................................................................................................................. 11

7. Reformat Images................................................................................................................................................ 11

8. Ensure That Feature Images Are Optimized to Load Early and Quickly........................................................... 12

9. Rethink the Design and Location of Call-to-Action Links in Feature Graphics................................................ 12

10. Defer Rendering Below the Fold Content..................................................................................................... 12

11. Defer Loading and Executing Non-Essential Scripts....................................................................................... 12

12. Use AJAX for Progressive Enhancement......................................................................................................... 12

13. Preload Page Resources in the Browser......................................................................................................... 12

14. Implement an Automated Web Performance Optimization Solution ............................................................. 13

Holiday Predictions....................................................................................................................................................... 13

1. Use of high-resolution video and imagery will increase.................................................................................... 13

2. Retailers will experiment with geo-targeting campaigns and content.............................................................. 13

3. Third-party scripts will proliferate...................................................................................................................... 13

4. The popularity of Responsive Web Design (RWD) will continue to grow.......................................................... 13

Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................................... 14
Take Charge of Your Websites Performance............................................................................................................... 14
About Radware............................................................................................................................................................. 15
Sources......................................................................................................................................................................... 15

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Introduction

When it comes to website speed, just one second can have a dramatic impact on revenue and
conversions. Walmart.com found that for every second of load time improvement, conversions
increased by up to 2%,1 while at Staples.com, one second of improvement increased
conversions by a staggering 10%.2
While these findings are compelling year round, they take on added importance during the
holiday shopping rush.
This year, holiday ecommerce sales are expected to reach a record high of $72 billion.3
Competition for this holiday spend will be greater than ever, as more and more retailers fight
for their share of the holiday ecommerce pie.

HOLIDAY ECOMMERCE SALES WILL HIT A RECORD HIGH IN 2014

US retail ecommerce is expected to grow by 16.6% this holiday season.
[source: eMarketer]

80
70
$72.41
billion

60
50
40

$53.89
billion

$62.11
billion

30
20
10
0

13.4%

15.3%

16.6%

2012

2013

2014

change

change

change

As part of this fight, many retailers will be leveraging aggressive strategies to attract and retain consumer attention.
These strategies include:
Increased use of high-quality images and videos, to meet customer demand for a rich shopping experience
Geo-targeted campaigns that offer shoppers highly targeted sales and special offers based on their location
Social shopping programs, such as Twitters new buy button and Facebooks ecommerce integration

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

While these strategies offer compelling benefits, they also come with a significant performance price tag. Hi-resolution
images and videos devour bandwidth and slow down page load. Geo-targeting relies on third-party tracking beacons
and recommendation services; these third-party scripts can cause pages to perform slowly and inconsistently. And
relying on social channels means giving away a degree of control over your customers online experience.
As site owners strive to offer their customers the best possible deals, those that also remember to offer the best
possible user experience an experience that is both rich and speedy will be most successful.

The Goal of This Report: Gain a Valuable Shoppers Eye View of Your Website

With user expectations at an all-time high and with those expectations in constant jeopardy of being compromised
by increasingly complex modern web pages it is more important than ever for site owners to have visibility into how
shoppers actually see their websites. This quarterly report, the latest in a research series that was initiated in 2010,
offers a unique shoppers eye view of the performance of the top 100 retail sites. It answers the following questions:
How do ecommerce pages actually render in real-world scenarios?
Are retail websites getting faster or slower over time? If not or if so then what factors are contributing to
these changes?
Are retailers adopting performance best practices that could give them an advantage over their competitors?
Except where otherwise noted, the results discussed in this report are for pages tested in Chrome 37. At the time
of conducting this research, Chrome was the most widely used browser in the United States, with a market share
of 33.34%.4

Key findings

Our key findings are discussed in detail in this report and summarized below:
The median top 100 ecommerce home page takes 6.5 seconds to render its primary content and 11.4 seconds
to fully load. This falls short of user expectations for pages to render in 3 seconds or less.
Only 12% of the top 100 retail sites rendered feature content in fewer than 3 seconds.
22% took 10 or more seconds just to be become interactive.
2% took 20 seconds or longer to become interactive.
With a payload of 1492 KB, the median page is 19% larger than it was one year ago.
While 100% of the top 100 sites have enabled keep-alives (a core performance best practice that allows the site
to maintain multiple connections between the browser and host server), CDN usage has dropped from 79% in
2013 to 74% in 2014. (Content delivery networks shorten server round trips and speed up rendering time.)
While images comprise 50% of the average pages total weight, 35% of sites failed to compress images, a
technique that could significantly reduce payload and streamline page rendering.

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Which Sites Were Fastest?

Among the top 100 ecommerce sites, these were the fastest in terms of their ability to display meaningful, interactive
content (e.g., feature banners with functional call-to-action buttons). This metric is known as time to interact (TTI)
and is distinct from the better-known load time metric. (Load time indicates when all of a pages resources from
images to third-party-party scripts have downloaded and rendered.)
From a user experience perspective, TTI is a more meaningful performance metric than load time, as it indicates
when a page begins to be usable.
We have provided the time to interact alongside each pages full load time in order to give perspective into the
distinction between the two metrics, and to illustrate that load time is not always the most meaningful measure of
a sites performance. For example, while Overstock.com has a load time of 17.1 seconds, it has a time to interact of
2.8 seconds; the TTI indicates that this site delivers a satisfactory user experience.

Abebooks.com
1.7s Load Time

1.2s TTI
1

seconds

seconds

seconds

seconds

seconds

seconds

BHphotovideo.com
1.4s TTI

2.1s Load Time

Adpost.com
4.8s Load Time

1.4s TTI
1

CDuniverse.com
3.8s Load Time

1.9s TTI
1

Wiley.com
2.5s TTI
1

2.9s Load Time

3

Netflix.com
8.9s Load Time

2.8s TTI
1

Overstock.com
17.1s Load Time

2.8s TTI
1

seconds

Frys.com
2.8s TTI
1

9.2s Load Time

3

seconds

seconds

seconds

Walgreens.com
3.2s Load Time

2.9s TTI
1

Adorama.com
5.4s Load Time

2.9s TTI
Smart Network.1Smart Business.
2

STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Finding 1: The Median Page Takes 6.5 Seconds to Render Feature Content
In an ideal world, web pages would render in 3 seconds or less, yet we found that
the median top 100 ecommerce home page takes 6.5 seconds to render its primary
content and 11.4 seconds to fully load.

To put this in perspective, here is a frame-by-frame shoppers eye view of how a

typical retail page loads, called out in 500-millisecond increments. This page remains
blank up until the 5.5-second mark, then at 6 seconds the navigation bar and search
field loads. At 6.5 seconds, the primary content has finally rendered sufficiently that it
can be considered interactive.

5.5s

6.0s

6.s

0%

34%

64%

In addition, we found that:

Only 12% of the top 100 retail sites rendered feature content in fewer than 3 seconds.
22% took 10 or more seconds just to be become interactive.
2% took 20 seconds or longer to become interactive. At the farthest end of the spectrum, the slowest page had
a Time to Interact of 30.5 seconds.

Finding 2: The Median Page Has Slowed Down by 23% in One Year

In just one year, median Time to Interact (TTI) has slowed down by 23%, and median load time has suffered a 33% increase.

Fall

Fall

Time to Interact (TTI) 2013 2014

Fall
2013

Load Time

5.3s 6.5s
1

Fall
2014

11.4s

8.6s
7

10

11

12

10

11

12

To understand why performance has suffered so dramatically in just over a twelve-month period, it is necessary
to understand the impact of page size and complexity on front-end web performance. See the next section of this
report for a detailed discussion of this issue.

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Finding 3: The Median Page Has Grown by 19% in One Year

With a payload of 1492 KB, the median page is 19% larger than it was one
year ago; however, as the graph on this page illustrates, page size has
decreased from its peak payload size of 1677 KB in Summer 2014.
In contrast, while overall page size has decreased, the number of page
resources such as images, JavaScript, and CSS files has significantly
increased, from 87 resources one year ago to 106 resources today. 10%
of the top 100 ecommerce sites contain more than 200 resource requests.
Each of these requests introduces incremental performance slowdown, as
well as the risk of page failure.

5 Common Performance Culprits

None of the page elements and practices described in this section is

inherently flawed. All offer significant benefit to designers, developers,
and site owners if they are implemented with performance in mind. All
too often, however, implementation occurs without consideration of how it
affects the user experience.

Performance Culprit #1: Images

Images

Everything
Else

In order to remain competitive, online retailers must meet consumers

demand for large, high-resolution product images, and with the advent of
retina displays, consumer expectations of image quality have never been
greater. According to the HTTP Archive, images comprise 50% of the
average top 100 pages total weight.5 But too often these images are in the
wrong format, uncompressed, or unoptimized all of which add up to a
serious performance drain.

Performance Culprit #2: Stylesheets

Stylesheets are an incredible boon for modern web pages. They solve a myriad of design problems, from browser
compatibility to design maintenance and updating. When poorly executed, however, stylesheets can create a
host of performance problems. These problems range from stylesheets that take too long to download and parse
to improperly placed stylesheets that block the rest of the page from rendering. (Later, this report will discuss
stylesheets in more detail, as they relate to custom fonts and responsive web design.)

In this snippet from a waterfall chart for WeightWatchers.com, there are three CSS files that take between 5586ms to
7732ms to download. The page relies on these files to define layout and styles. As a result, the user looks at a blank
screen until they download.

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Performance Culprit #3: Custom Fonts

Custom fonts allow designers unprecedented aesthetic control over the typefaces used in their designs. This desire
for control accounts for the surge in popularity for custom fonts. In 2010, only 1% of the top 1,000 websites used
custom fonts. Today, that number has grown to 44%.

% OF PAGES USING CUSTOM FONTS

50
40

33

30
20
10
0

1
Nov - 10

4
May - 11

Nov - 11

May - 12

13

Nov - 12

40

44

17

May - 13

Nov - 13

May - 14

Sep - 01

This popularity comes with a performance price tag, as some fonts require huge amounts of CSS code (see
previous page), while others have heavy JavaScript or are hosted externally all of which can dramatically slow
down page rendering.

These two lines, excerpted from the waterfall chart for GNC.com, illustrate a worst-case scenario in which the
browser spends more than 4 seconds attempting to download an externally hosted custom font before the server call
times out. Because of this, the page takes more than 9 seconds just to start rendering.

Performance Culprit #4: Third-Party Scripts

Third-party scripts such as those used for ads, recommendations, analytics, and tracking beacons offer a number
of benefits, such as increased ad revenue, higher conversion rates, and better visitor data. These benefits explain the
recent proliferation of third-party scripts on ecommerce pages, such that third-party calls can make up to 50% -- or
more -- of a pages total resource requests.
Cumulatively, these third-party requests can have a huge impact on page performance. Unoptimized scripts can
slow down page load by several seconds, or even stall it completely. Third-party scripts are one of the most common
points of failure for sites: just a single line of JavaScript can take down an entire site. Despite this, measuring the
impact of third-party content on a sites usability is often neglected.

STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Performance Culprit #5: Responsive Web Design

With the advent of responsive web design (RWD), designers have the much-needed ability to customize layout to suit
multiple screen formats. But responsive design is a tool, not a usability cure-all. While responsive pages can be fast,
too often they are excessively heavy and unnecessarily slow.

In this snippet from the waterfall chart for NeimanMarcus.com, we see that both the CSS and JavaScript files for RWD
resources are not only heavy, requiring up to 6528ms to download, they also block the rest of the page from rendering.

Finding 4: Adoption of Performance Best Practices Remains Inconsistent

There are dozens of best practices for optimizing performance. While it is not within the scope of this report to analyze
the adoption of each individual technique, there are three that offer different perspectives on performance optimization.

Enable Keep-Alives

For the first time since beginning this research in 2010, we found that 100% of the top 100
ecommerce websites enable keep-alives, a core performance best practice that allows the
site to maintain multiple connections between the browser and host server.
Enabling keep-alives is a fundamental performance best practice. Because this is a
relatively simple task requiring one-time server/load balancer configuration it is not
surprising to learn that it has been implemented on every site in the top 100.

Use a CDN

CDNs serve an important performance optimization role by caching page resources closer
to end users. This shortens server round trips and speeds up rendering time. While enabling
keep-alives has experienced an unprecedented implementation high, the number of sites
effectively using a content delivery network (CDN) has been inconsistent over the past year,
with a general trend toward decline.

80%

79%

80%
75%

75%

70%

Fall 2013
Smart Network.
Smart Business.Winter

78%

2013

Spring 2014

74%

Summer 2014

Fall 2014

STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Compress Images

Image compression is a performance technique that minimizes the size (in bytes) of a graphics file without degrading
the quality of the image to an unacceptable level. Reducing an images file size has two benefits:
Reducing the amount of time required for images to be sent over the internet or downloaded.
Increasing the number of images that can be stored in the browser cache, thereby improving page render time
on repeat visits to the same page.
Compressing image files lightens a web pages overall payload. Fewer bytes mean reduced bandwidth and faster
pages. Yet more than one third of sites fail to compress images.

JPEG

A B

13% 12%

C D

13% 21%

35%

N/A
6%

While enabling keep-alives is a server configuration issue, and caching content is a responsibility that is generally
outsourced to a third-party CDN, image compression is a task that is performed in-house. The low adoption rate for this
task can be construed as an indicator of the overall low rate of adoption for other performance optimization techniques.

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10

14 Best Practices to Cure Your Web Sites Performance Pains

There are a number of best practices site owners can implement in order to improve both the real and perceived
user experience for online shoppers. Some of these techniques can be implemented manually or via an automated
solution, while others can only be performed by automated solutions.

1. Consolidate JavaScript and CSS

Consolidating JavaScript code and CSS styles into common files that can be shared across multiple pages should
be a common practice. This technique simplifies code maintenance and improves the efficiency of client-side
caching. In JavaScript files, be sure that the same script isnt downloaded multiple times for one page. Redundant
script downloads are especially likely when large teams or multiple teams collaborate on page development.

2. Minify Code

Minification, which is usually applied to scripts and style sheets, eliminates non-essential characters such as spaces,
newline characters, and comments. A correctly minified resource is used on the client without any special processing,
and file-size reductions average about 20%. Script and style blocks within HTML pages can also be minified.
There are many good libraries available to perform minification, often along with services to combine multiple files
into one, which additionally reduces requests.

3. Enable Keep-Alives

Enabling keep-alives is one of the easiest low hanging fruit on the performance optimization tree, yet a significant
number of sites fail to do this. TCP connection is the process by which both the user and the server send and
receive acknowledgment that a connection has been made and data can begin to be transferred. Too many TCP
connections will slow down your site. Its not easy to speed up TCP connection, but you can control how many times
the connection takes place. To enable keep-alives, make sure you have the proper configuration on your servers and
load balancer.

4. Compress Text

Compression technologies such as gzip reduce payloads at the slight cost of adding processing steps to compress
on the server and decompress in the browser. These operations are highly optimized, however, and tests show
that the overall effect is a net improvement in performance. Text-based responses, including HTML, XML, JSON
(JavaScript Object Notation), JavaScript, and CSS, can all be reduced in size by as much as 70%.

5. Sprite Images

Spriting is a CSS technique for consolidating images. Sprites are simply multiple images combined into a rectilinear
grid in one large image. The page fetches the large image all at once as a single CSS background image and then
uses CSS background positioning to display the individual component images as needed on the page. This reduces
multiple requests to only one, significantly improving performance.

6. Compress Images

Image compression is a performance technique that minimizes the size (in bytes) of a graphics file without degrading
the quality of the image to an unacceptable level. Reducing an images file size has two benefits:
lessening the amount of time required for images to be sent over the internet or downloaded, and
increasing the number of images that can be stored in the browser cache, thereby improving page render time
on repeat visits to the same page.

7. Reformat Images

Inappropriate image formatting is an extremely common performance culprit. An image that is saved to the wrong
format can be several times larger than it would be if saved to the optimal format. Images with unnecessarily high
resolution waste bandwidth, processing time, and cache space.

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

As a general rule of thumb, these are the optimal formats for common image types:

Photos JPEG, PNG-24

Low complexity (few colors) GIF, PNG-8
Low complexity with transparency GIF, PNG-8
High complexity with transparency PNG-24
Line art SVG

8. Ensure That Feature Images Are Optimized to Load Early and Quickly

As discussed earlier in this report, site owners should be aware of the usability consequence of delaying the
rendering of feature content: a user who experiences instantaneous page rendering spends 20% of their viewing time
within the feature area of a page, whereas a user who endures an eight-second download delay spends only 1% of
their total viewing time looking at the featured space on a page.

9. Rethink the Design and Location of Call-to-Action Links in Feature Graphics

While the accepted design convention has been to position CTA buttons at the bottom of feature banners, this
convention does not always serve the best interests of users or site owners, as shoppers must wait for the image to
fully render before taking their next action on the page. The simplest solution: Reposition the CTA.

10. Defer Rendering Below the Fold Content

Ensure that the user sees the page quicker by delaying the loading and rendering of any content that is below the
initially visible area, sometimes called below the fold. To eliminate the need to reflow content after the remainder of
the page is loaded, replace images initially with placeholder <img> tags that specify the correct height and width.

11. Defer Loading and Executing Non-Essential Scripts

Many script libraries arent needed until after a page has finished rendering. Downloading and parsing these scripts
can safely be deferred until after the onload event. For example, scripts that support interactive user behavior, such
as drag and drop, cant possibly be called before the user has even seen the page. The same logic applies to script
execution. Defer as much as possible until after onload instead of needlessly holding up the initial rendering of the
important visible content on the page.
The script to defer could be your own or, often more importantly, scripts from third parties. Poorly optimized scripts
for advertisements, social media widgets, or analytics support can block a page from rendering, sometimes adding
precious seconds to load times.

12. Use AJAX for Progressive Enhancement

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a technique for using the XHR (XMLHttpRequest) object to fetch data
from a web server without refreshing the page where the code is running. AJAX enables a page to display updated
data in a section of a page without reconstructing the entire page. This is often used to respond to user interaction,
but it can also enable your application to load a bare-bones version of a page quickly, and then to fill in more detailed
content while the user is already viewing the page.

13. Preload Page Resources in the Browser

Auto-preloading is a powerful performance technique in which all user paths through a website are observed and
recorded. Based on this massive amount of aggregated data, the auto-preloading engine can predict where a user
is likely to go based on the page they are currently on and the previous pages in their path. The engine loads the
resources for those next pages in the users browser cache, enabling the page to render up to 70% faster.
Note that this is a data-intensive, highly dynamic technique that can only be performed by an automated solution.

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

14. Implement an Automated Web Performance Optimization Solution

While many of the performance techniques outlined above can be performed manually by developers, hand-coding
pages for performance is specialized, time-consuming work. It is also a never-ending task, particularly on highly
dynamic sites that contain hundreds of objects per page, as both browser requirements and page requirements
continue to develop. Automated front-end performance optimization solutions, such as Radware FastView, apply a
range of performance techniques that deliver faster pages consistently and reliably across the entire site.

Holiday Predictions

Looking ahead to the upcoming holiday shopping season, we foresee a number of trends, all of which will have a
measurable impact on performance.

1. Use of high-resolution video and imagery will increase.

Visual content is powerful, and there is compelling evidence that product videos increase conversion rates. In order
to give online shoppers a richer, more immersive shopping experience, retailers will be adding an unprecedented
volume of video to product detail pages. In addition, retailers will include more large, high-resolution images to meet
consumer demand for a granular level of product detail, particularly for consumers using devices with retina displays.
But video and high-resolution images both come with high bandwidth demands, not to mention significant
performance penalties. A recent neurological study commissioned by Radware found that Internet users are highly
sensitive to how images render: 51% of users wait for most or all of a pages images to load before they begin to
interact with the page, and some image formats (such as baseline images) deliver a greater level of user engagement
than others (such as progressive images).6
The performance pitfalls generated by images must be mitigated, or else retailers risk seeing the conversion gains
realized by using a highly visual strategy compromised by conversion losses caused by slow load times.

2. Retailers will experiment with geo-targeting campaigns and content.

Recognizing that shoppers can come from any part of the country or world ecommerce vendors will use geolocation to identify each shoppers country, state, or even city in order to serve highly specialized deals, content,
and product offerings in local languages and currencies. While geo-targeting offers clear value to shoppers (who
receive the most relevant content) and to site owners (who can tailor campaigns and messaging most suited to
each audience), it can be complex at a programmatic level. Depending on the skill with which it is implemented,
the JavaScript required to query a geolocation database can be slow or non-responsive, leading to pages that are
sluggish or, worse, pages that fail to load.

3. Third-party scripts will proliferate.

Third-party scripts from ads to recommendation engines to analytics to tracking/retargeting beacons offer a great
deal of potential value to retailers. This value is the reason why pages will be more laden than ever with third-party
scripts. As with geo-targeting, third-party JavaScript presents the risk of slow or unresponsive web pages.

4. The popularity of Responsive Web Design (RWD) will continue to grow.

Despite the large amount of talk about RWD, it is not yet widely implemented. As site owners increasingly acknowledge
the challenges of delivering a consistent, rich user experience across an ever-growing range of platforms and devices,
more and more ecommerce sites will adopt responsive or a marriage of responsive and adaptive design. While
some of this development will be implemented with performance in mind, most will not. As a result, we will see page
sizes continue to increase dramatically, with pages of 3MB or more becoming a common sight.

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Conclusion

It is crucial that site owners maintain or better yet, increase their vigilance regarding the performance impact of
new features. As pages continue to increase in complexity, this complexity will continue to introduce performance
challenges. This complexity comes from a myriad of sources: high-resolution images, responsive web design, thirdparty scripts, custom fonts, stylesheets, and more. Before deploying new features or content, those features and
content should be tested and implemented with performance in mind.
It is equally crucial that site owners retain ongoing visibility into how their pages perform in the real world. Many
shoppers do not have the luxury of using a late-model computer over a high-speed Internet connection a fact that
can be easily forgotten by developers and designers. Backbone tests and real user monitoring (RUM) reports are
essential performance measurement tools, but they should be augmented with tools such as WebPagetest.org, the
online tool used to generate the page-load filmstrips in this report that provide a visual shoppers eye view of how a
page performs for users under less than ideal browsing conditions.
While a typical page takes more than 6 seconds to become interactive falling far short of user expectations for
speedy load times of 3 seconds or less the positive takeaway is that there are a number of tools and techniques
that site owners can leverage to optimize performance. Many of these tools and techniques have, to date, been left
on the floor. In the race to provide online shoppers with the best possible online experience, site owners who pick up
these tools and take advantage them will give themselves a significant head start.

Take Charge of Your Websites Performance

You dont have to settle for slow pages. There are a number of tools and
techniques you can leverage to accelerate your site. Find out more:
http://www.radware.com/FastView/

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STATE OF THE UNION

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Fall 2014

Methodology

The tests in this study were conducted using an online tool called WebPagetest an open-source project
primarily developed and supported by Google which simulates page load times from a real users perspective
using real browsers.
Radware tested the home page of every site in the Alexa Retail 500 nine consecutive times. The system automatically
clears the cache between tests. The median test result for each home page was recorded and used in our calculations.
The tests were conducted on September 22, 2014, via the WebPagetest.org server in Dulles, VA, using Chrome 37 on
a DSL connection.
In very few cases, WebPagetest rendered a blank page or an error in which none of the page rendered. These
instances were represented as null in the test appendix.
Also, in very few cases WebPagetest.org rendered a page in more than 60 seconds (the default timeout for
WebPagetest.org). In these cases, 60 seconds was used for the result instead of null.
To identify the Time to Interact (TTI) for each page, we generated a timed filmstrip view of the median page load
for each site in the Alexa Retail 100. Time to Interact is defined as the moment that the featured page content and
primary call-to-action button or menu is rendered in the frame.

About Radware

Radware (NASDAQ: RDWR), is a global leader of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual
and cloud data centers. Its award-winning solutions portfolio delivers full resilience for business-critical applications,
maximum IT efficiency, and complete business agility. Radwares solutions empower more than 10,000 enterprise
and carrier customers worldwide to adapt to market challenges quickly, maintain business continuity, and achieve
maximum productivity while keeping costs down. For more information, please visit www.radware.com.

Sources


3

4

5

6

1

Real User Monitoring at Walmart.com, February 2012

SOASTA, Making More Happen: How to Measure Revenue in Milliseconds, September 2014
eMarketer, Holiday Shopping Preview: Ecommerce Grows as Brick-and-Mortar Stores Embrace Digital, September 2014
StatCounter Global Browser Stats, September 2014
HTTP Archive. September 15, 2014
Radware, Progressive Image rendering: Good or Evil?, September 2014

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