Consumers and users are spending more time online than ever before.
Covid 19 pandemic only increased that trend. Applications need to be faster and more reliable to reach users’ expectations.
End-Users always expect from web applications to be fast like a rocket, they will lose interest if they have to wait for web application to load. Companies are losing millions in revenue because of speed of their web apps.
We need to keep in mind that a one second delay in page load yields:
· 11% fewer page views
· 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
· 7% loss in conversions
Here we are going to compare 5 top Canadian Retailers to see how their E-commerce web applications performed during holiday shopping weekend.
We have set up performance monitoring tests on each application, we have conducted end point monitoring from external locations.
Tests were performed over 4 days period, just to be sure that we have enough data for meaningful conclusions.
We have used dotcom-monitor for that particular tests because it makes easy to ensure solid performance testing and uptimes of web-applications.
After thorough analysis of monitoring tests our major findings are as follow.
Real-world performance is highly variable due to differences in users' devices, network connections, and other factors.
All of monitored web-apps faced performance issues. Some of them lead to serious application slowdowns.
One of the reoccurring problem was DNS time. As we know DNS stands for Domain Name System, DNStime is the amount of time it takes a domain lookup to occur while a browser retrieves a resource.
Every third-party resource used on a webpage (tracking, analytics, social buttons, etc.) adds a DNS lookup. This is not the best approach. It is not uncommon for a page to have 5 to 15 DNS lookups which have nothing to do with the actual page content.
All of the tested sites faced issues with long DNS times,
Page timing breakdown
Page components
As you can see on the diagram above, this page is relying on 58 hosts and most of the page weight are image files.
Like nature needs balance, we should remember and try to maintain it everywhere around us, including technology. Working on reducing number of dependencies or size of components can help us be back on track in application performance.
DNS times, FirstPacket times and SSL times can be improved in every tested application.
You need right tools and some experience to speed it up. Improving user-experience is always step in the right direction.
This chart shows how fast one of the analyzed applications is loading:
Almost 10 seconds. This is a long waiting time for a user, it can result with loss of interest for a user, ending up with abandon cart…
We have noticed errors and substantial applications slowdowns on every one of them.
Asking yourself how that can impact your business is reasonable thing to do.
“Speed has a direct impact on your business. It determines the quality of the customer experience you provide, how likely you are to retain customers, and influences your conversion rates. It is no longer acceptable to lose customers over controllable metrics. If you care about your business, you care about your performances” (medium.com).
Some of the company’s revenue relies fully on their online presence, making sure that application performance is attracting more customers is a must of every online business.
Need help? Feel free to connect with us.
Performetriks is a performance engineering and application security service provider with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. One of our main tasks is ensuring that applications are operating fast and securely.
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