Businesses, regardless of their niche or industry, want users to have an exceptional experience on their websites. The Creative Web Solutions team loves measuring the performance of the website and checking out how it could be optimized.
You can’t afford to ignore the importance of website loading speed as your customers’ online behavior evolves with each passing day. Here are some of the reasons why site performance is still a greater concern than you actually think.
Web users have become impatient because of slow websites
People who are now exploring your products and services on the internet do not have the patience to wait for a slow website to load on their smartphone or laptop. They seek instant access to all information. The more you make people wait, the more they repel.
Website speed affects search visibility
The response time of a website to web requests is measured as site speed. Website performance is vital to all Internet users, search engines, and most importantly your business. Faster sites result in satisfied users, and we’ve noticed in our own tests that visitors spend less time on sites that respond slowly.
Now that we know the importance of site speed and its overall contribution to the success of a website engagement, we would like to share our study on the most important site speed factors.
Our discovery on some popular website’s speed
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It takes 0.5 seconds for the fastest site to load
Just under half of the 50 sites we tested loaded in under the 2-second acceptable e-commerce threshold, with the top performers being bhphotovideo.com, hm.com, and bestbuy.com, which all loaded in under 1 second. That’s what we mean when we say “optimal performance”!
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Performance of top 50 e-commerce websites
Homepage loading time distribution
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Average
2.51 s
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Fastest
0.457 s
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Slowest
8.32 s
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Page size is a significant factor in website speed
Naturally, we did tests to check how big each of the top 50 e-commerce sites’ homepages was and discovered that there was a big difference in size: the smallest was just over half a megabyte , while the largest was just under 10MB.[vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”10″ down=”12″]
Performance of top 50 e-commerce websites
Homepage size distribution
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Min size
0.57 MB
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Average size
2.55 MB
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Max size
9.82 MB
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Number of requests send
The smallest of the 50 sites, tmall.com, had the lowest requests, with only 50. All of the top 10 sites had less than 100 requests per load. On the other end of the spectrum is rakuten.com.jp, which received an incredible 825 requests. That’s 16.5 times the number of requests made by the quickest of our top 50 sites! You may use the rule of thumb that the more requests a website has, the slower it will load, especially if each element has not been appropriately optimized.
Performance of top 50 e-commerce websites
Number of request distribution
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website speed graph alexa
Data Sources: Alexa.com (Top 50 list)
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Performance Grade
The YSlow performance rating indicates how well a website complies with YSlow’s web performance benchmarks. We were astonished to learn that just one of the top 50 e-commerce sites (bhphotovideo.com) had an overall ‘A’ score, so congrats to them! The majority of the sites (31 out of 50) obtained a ‘D’ or below rating. In fact, bhphotovideo.com was the only one of the 50 sites we examined to consistently rank in the top ten in all of our tests.
website speed optimization graph
Data Sources: Alexa.com (Top 50 list)
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Conclusion – Every website has some room for improvement
While overall site load times have improved significantly, there is still more room for potential improvement. You probably go to one or more of these websites on a regular basis. Perhaps you rely on them for essential purchases or information! Is it true that their speed influences your decision on which ones you return to more frequently than others? In a world where time is money, the speed of a website plays a crucial role.