Mashable talks to Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby about web speed and the future of mobile ticketing

Following the publication of Joshua's blog post about Opening Day and the performance of leading online ticket agents, Mashable's Sam Laird talked to Joshua about why some sites suffer more than others and what this means for mobile users.

Joshua tested the performance of nine sites across a purchasing transaction, up to but not including checkout. The fastest transaction happened on CheapMLBTickets.com (12.08 seconds) and the slowest was, surprisingly, on the official Major League Baseball site, MLB.com (43.37 seconds). 

Joshua explains this disparity:

So why the big differences in transaction times? By and large, the sites with more resources to download were the ones with the longer delays. Bixby blames that on a “tug of war” between site performance and the desire to host advertising and other images.

"So far the tug of war has been won by the marketers and the image-makers. What's happening is that performance is a key feature and it's kind of being neglected in some cases."

So how can these site owners fix their performance pains?

Bixby says slower sites can improve performance — and subsequently discourage customers abandoning transactions — by streamlining pages to load fewer resources and by cutting the number of pages in the transaction process. As people continue to turn to mobile devices for shopping more frequently — and still prefer to buy via mobile sites over apps — transaction speed will only grow in importance.

Read the full article: Looking for Baseball Tickets? You Might Want to Avoid These Slow Sites

Strangeloop offers two solutions to desktop and mobile performance pains.
Learn more about our Site Optimizer and Mobile Site Optimizer.