Site Speed Jackpot – 500 eCommerce Sites Tested

500 eCommerce Sites Tested?
We came across an interesting post written by Ian Lurie, the Chairman and Principal Consultant at PI PORTENT.  Ian took the time to perform tests on 500 eCommerce sites.
What he discovered will open up your eyes to how much money you could be leaving on the table if you don’t pay attention to your performance metrics.

Opportunity
Like Ian, we preach about the benefits of having a faster site every day.  In fact, everywhere you look there are ads pitching the benefits of having a faster loading site.
It’s like you can’t get away from it, yet not many site owners / admins are doing anything about it.  What does that mean for you?  OPPORTUNITY.

What They Found

Over 50% of eCommerce sites tested had an average load time of 5+ seconds.

The biggest and easiest value jump is getting your site load time from 8 seconds down to 5 seconds as you will see in Ian’s graph.  The biggest revenue jump happens when you get your site to drop down to a 1 second load time from 2 seconds, but going from 8 to 5 seconds is easier and generates an 18% value/page view increase.

Software Adjustments
If you’re into the development side of maintaining your website, Ian goes into much more detail on minifying code, javascript timing, ETags, expired headers and image compression.  It will be worth your time to check out his post.

 Hardware Adjustments
We have performed a series of our own case studies and want to leave you with 6 observations:

1. Most developers / site owners realize that they can increase revenue by simply speeding up their page load times.

2. They run a series of speed tests through Google Insights or Webpagespeedtest and gather data.

3. They obtain detailed reports that show them how they can improve their page load times.

4. They focus their attention very heavily on coding / design while sometimes overlooking the performance of their server.

5. Those that understand their server plays a significant role in site speed start researching hosting platforms.

6. But they are hesitant to make a change with their hosting platform because they believe it is a monumental task, or they just don’t know who to trust.

Easy & Painless Solution
We took all of these variables into consideration while searching for an easy solution to take away the pain, so we created a live Magento hosting comparison tool. We have given these concerned individuals the opportunity to compare their current Magento site to a live mirror copy of itself on an optimized platform for free, just to take the fear factor away and show them what can happen when they get a tailored hosting plan that complements their specific site.

Tom P May 15, 2014