We tested the load times of the top 500 retails sites and found that the median page takes 10 seconds to load – a 47% slowdown in just two years. The culprit? A combination of page bloat, missed opportunities, and site owners straggling with web performance best practices. Why should you care? The majority of online shoppers will abandon a page after 3 seconds. Just a few seconds can make all the difference and significantly affect conversions, customer satisfaction and revenue. Read the State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance report http://www.radware.com/spring-sotu2014/ and discover new optimization tips to cure performance pains and deliver faster pages.

1. 3s
2s
1s
5.4smedian
The median top 500 ecommerce home page takes 10
seconds to load. In spring 2012, the median page loaded in
6.8 seconds. This represents a 47% slowdown in just two years.
Even worse, 10% of pages took 20 seconds or longer to load.
This means that a visitor spends 5.4 seconds
waiting for the page’s primary content to appear and
become interactive. Most online shoppers report that they
will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
PAGE SPEED & WEB PERFORMANCE
STATE OF THE UNION | SPRING 2014
We tested the load times of the most popular
retail web sites and found that the median
page takes 5.4 seconds to become usable
and 10 seconds to load. The culprit? Pages
that reach up to 13 MB in size and fail to
follow web performance best practices.
THE MEDIAN PAGE TAKES 10 SECONDS TO LOAD.
THE MEDIAN PAGE TAKES 5.4S
TO BECOME USABLE.
RETAIL LEADERS PERFORMED WORSE THAN
THE TOP 500.
HOW FAST ARE THE WORLD’S TOP SHOPPING SITES?
SPRING 2012
FALL 2012
6.8s
7.4s
47%
SLOWDOWN IN
JUST 2 YEARS
LOAD TIME (seconds)
SPRING 2013
FALL 2013
SPRING 2014
7.5s
8.6s
10.0s
6 7 8 9 10
Looking at the top 100
sites, the median site
took 10.7 seconds to
load, compared to 6.6
seconds in spring 2012.
Spring 2014 - 10.7s
Fall 2013 - 8.7s
Spring 2013 - 8.2s
Fall 2012 - 7.1s
Spring 2012 - 6.6s
This represents
a 62% slowdown
in two years.
1.3s
1.7s 1.8s
2.0s 2.0s 2.0s 2.1s
2.3s
2.5s
2.7s 2.7s
2.9s 3.0s
Abebooks.com
BHPhotovideo.com
CDUniverse
Barnesandnoble.com
Nordstrom.com
Net-a-porter.com
Amazon.com
Fineartamerica.com
6pm.com
Wiley.com
Urbanoutfitters.com
Shopbop.com
Carmax.com
of pages took 10 seconds
or longer to become interactive.
These were the only sites that became interactive in 3 seconds or less:
More than three-quarters of pages
did not use progressive JPEGs, a
performance best practice that can
improve perceived page speed.
Only 8% scored an
A in this area.
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© 2014 Radware, Ltd. All rights reserved. | www.radware.com
State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance
http://www.radware.com/spring-sotu2014
seconds is the maximum
threshold for a visitor’s patience.
9%
10
USING A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK
DOESN’T ALWAYS EQUAL FASTER PAGES
WHY ARE PAGES SLOWER?
JPEG
GIF
GIF
JPEG
GIF
JPEG
No
25%
Yes
75%
USE A CDN
75% of the top 100 retail sites use a CDN
to cache page resources, such as images,
closer to end users, while 25% do not.
Yet this performance best practice
doesn’t correlate to faster pages.
There are a number of reasons
why pages have slowed down.
The number one culprit is
images, which account for at
least half of a typical page’s total
size. What’s worse, many images
are not optimized to render
quickly in the browser.
The median page contains 99
resources and is 1510 KB in
size. In other words, a typical
page is 20% bigger than it
was just six months ago.
Median TTI for sites
that don’t use a CDN
4.7seconds
Median TTI for sites
that use a CDN
5.7seconds
1258kilobytes
1510kilobytes
FALL
2013
SPRING
2014
20% bigger
than six
months ago.
MOST SITES FAIL TO EXPLOIT IMAGE
OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES
There are techniques available for optimizing images for performance,
but most sites fail to fully exploit them. 34% of pages failed to compress
images, while only 8% scored an A in image compression.
A
8%
B
14%
C
20%
D
15%
F
34%
n/a
8%
JPEGs
PROGRESSIVEF
76%
A - 8%
B - 1%
C - 2%
D - 2%
n/a -11%