FREE REPORT: State of the Union for Ecommerce Page Speed and Website Performance [Fall 2012]

Ecommerce web pages are 9% slower compared to 2011, page sizes are growing, and Internet Explorer 10 is the fastest major browser. These were among the findings of our newest quarterly report, released today: State of the Union: E-Commerce Page Speed and Website Performance [Fall 2012].

The report contains performance data from 2,000 of the world’s top retail websites, as ranked by Alexa.com. The data focuses on the user experience for retail customers shopping via Chrome 20, Firefox 13, and Internet Explorer 9 and 10.

A quick summary of the report’s key findings:

• Pages are 9% slower than they were last year. The median load time for first-time visitors is now 6.5 seconds, up from 5.94 in November 2011.
• Page sizes have increased by 5%. The median page now requires 77 server round trips to load page objects, up from 73 in 2011.
• Load times for top sites are even slower. The median load time for the top 100 sites saw a 12% drop, mostly due to more content-rich pages.

What does this all mean? Our CEO Jonathan Bixby puts it this way:

"This data tells us that when it comes to performance, many retailers are still leaving money on the table. Site owners should be conducting routine tests across a variety of browsers. They should be measuring performance using a variety of metrics, and they need to ensure third-party scripts have been optimized. Implementing these basic performance tenets will drastically improve revenue."

Strangeloop has undertaken this performance survey annually since 2010. This release marks its migration to a quarterly report.

Download the FREE report: E-commerce Page Speed and Website Performance