'Net Features : web performance

Cart Abandonment; Just How Bad Is it?

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 21:00:00 GMT

Just how bad is the problem of cart abandonment for Internet retailers? New research from Ipswitch’s Network Management division shows that this Cyber Monday, online shoppers will have no patience for poor Web performance, and will leave many merchants high and dry.

In fact, the survey reveals that 92 percent of surveyed consumers have abandoned a website because of a disappointing Web service. 64 percent of shoppers will make only two attempts to purchase a product before bailing. But it doesn’t stop there – 52 percent of shoppers will turn to a competitors website to buy a similar product and about one in three (32 percent) won’t buy the product at all.

“Online shoppers are already searching for the best deals, and Cyber Monday sales are expected to exceed last year’s $1.25 billion record,” said Ronnie Ray, VP of Product Management for Ipswitch, the company behind the WhatsUp Gold suite of IT Management solutions. “Inevitably, too many companies will fall victim to website downtime, failed transactions and lost sales."

"This is the most important time of the year for retailers, and poor Web sales will have a substantial impact on their bottom line," said Ray. "They must monitor complete end-user experience in real-time and proactively address network issues to protect their business."

Slow Response Times Cause Cancelled Orders for Merchants

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:30:00 GMT

New research from application monitoring service Monitis confirms the impact of web performance on sales performance.

The survey revealed that 56% of consumers who spend more than two hours per week shopping online have cancelled an order due to an error or slow response time.

“Simply avoiding downtime is often the primary goal for web developers and designers when maintaining websites, but as the holiday rush has shifted to online stores, success depends less on the minimum threshold of uptime and more on meeting the various other expectations of shoppers, to keep them coming back,” said Hovhannes Avoyan, General Manager at Monitis. “Consumers turn to online vendors for convenience, so it’s critical that e-retailers ensure a positive shopping experience by focusing on website usability and speed.

The survey of over 1,000 U.S. online shoppers, which explored online shopping habits, the factors influences users choosing an online vendor, and behavior when confronted with retail websites that are not functioning correctly, contains a long list of useful information.

- Almost three-quarters (74%) of all online shoppers said that they would switch to a competing online vendor if they could find a better user experience and faster website than the one they currently use.

- Frequent online shoppers are even less tolerant of slow e-retail websites. 86% of consumers who spend two or more hours shopping each week say that they would abandon their chosen online vendor if they found a faster competitor.

- 81% of all respondents listed convenience as the number one reason for choosing to shop online rather than making purchases at brick and mortar stores, while only 61% say that price is the most important factor.

- More than half of all respondents (56%) also indicated that website usability is an important factor when comparing one retail website to another, coming in just behind price and reputation.

- 61% of all online shoppers would leave a web page and search for a competing vendor if it took longer than 30 seconds to load.

- The most popular time to shop online (40% of all respondents) is actually during typical 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work hours while the next largest group (32%) of online shoppers typically shops in the early evening between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Increase Page-load Speeds with SiteSpect AMPS

Linc Wonham — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 02:00:00 GMT

SiteSpect has launched a Web and mobile performance optimization solution that leverages the power of multivariate testing and behavioral targeting.

In recent customer deployments, SiteSpect’s automated multivariate performance optimization solution (AMPS) has decreased page load times by as much as 50 to 70 percent. Faster websites not only improve the user experience but also increase conversion rates and average order values. Additionally, major search engine crawlers are now evaluating site speeds in their algorithms and ranking faster sites higher in search results.

Any type of site can be optimized with SiteSpect AMPS including e-commerce, publishing and social media, intranets, extranets and mobile-specific WAP sites. AMPS measures not only speed but also key performance indicators including bounce rate, conversion rate, average order value, abandonment and compound metrics that look at multiple behaviors both within and across visits.

Below are some of the key features to SiteSpect AMPS:

•    On-Page Optimization – reduces the size of CSS and JavaScript files, combines scripts, and reorders elements for optimal processing and rendering.
•    Cache Optimization – adjusts content cache settings to reduce network overhead, thereby decreasing page load time while simultaneously increasing Web server capacity.
•    Dynamic Parallelization – optimizes the browser’s ability to retrieve content by increasing parallelism, without requiring any change to the server or browser.
•    Network Optimization – SiteSpect's global private cloud utilizes real-time network measurements to determine fastest paths from any end-user location.
•    Cloud Delivery – SiteSpect's built-in cache positions content closer to the end user for reduced latency when delivering static content.
•    Modular Architecture – allows clients to test, measure the impact of, and deploy third-party performance solutions such as CDNs and open-source tools such as Steve Souders' ControlJS.

SiteSpect AMPS is available as either an on-premise enterprise appliance or a cloud-based ASP version, and both versions integrate seamlessly with SiteSpect's content testing and targeting solutions. Visit SiteSpect for more information.

Retailer Provided Best Online Experience During Holidays

Linc Wonham — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 04:51:00 GMT

Record sales were not the only thing online retailers achieved during the past holiday season, at least not according to a study conducted by Web performance solutions provider AlertSite.

E-commerce merchants continue to improve their sites’ performance capabilities during periods of high volume, as exhibited in AlertSite’s 2010 holidays report. The retailer earning the highest marks for providing customers with the best online experience was Williams-Sonoma with a 99.98-percent availability and an average response time of 11.58 seconds.

Sam’s Club and QVC shared second-place honors with the same 99.98-percent availability and identical response times of 13.46 seconds. The trend for improved availability percentages is witnessed by the 97.52-percent average achieved by the major Web retailers included in the study, and the average response time of 20.83 seconds was also an improvement year-to-year.

Forever 21 had the fastest response time of a mere 7.48 seconds, followed by Fashion Bug with 8.23 seconds and Avon with 8.71.

“What this tells us is retailers are learning from past experiences, and putting time and resources into testing the performance of their sites before the holidays arrive,” said Ken Gross, AlertSite President and CEO. “Year-over-year, the occurrence of major website outages or slowdowns during the holidays decreases - evidence of retailers' increased understanding and grasp on their Web performance metrics.”

Merchants take note: the relevance of these trends are not to be underestimated. Studies show that consumer demands are more than keeping up with improved website performance. One recent survey from Forrester Research found that online shoppers expect to wait no longer than two seconds for a page to load, and that nearly half of them would abandon the site altogether after three seconds of waiting.

SEO Analytics from Cotendo

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:18:00 GMT

Does website performance influence your SEO rankings? Absolutely and technology vendors are coming to the market's rescue with solutions which can relieve some of the bottleneck issues that can negatively impact SEM campaigns.

CDN and site acceleration services provider Cotendo has released a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Analytics Service which provides analytics and reporting on search engine crawler activity, giving content providers the need to optimize website performance, increasingly important in improving and maintaining competitive rankings on the SERPs.

Cotendo chief technology officer David Drai said that website crawlers dispatched by search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing scan the entire site, including slower-loading pages which, due to their poor performance, may not get as much traffic as faster-loading pages. "Using our SEO Analytics Service, content providers can identify those less-popular pages and then quickly fix their loading problem. The result: those pages now attract more traffic, and their increased popularity boosts the site's overall SEO ranking," Drai said.

The Cotendo SEO Analytics Service includes aggregated reports of all crawler activity, crawler comparison reports, hits and error reports, object delivery time reports, error code reports, and customisable alerts.

Said Ronni Zehavi, Cotendo's CEO, "With our SEO Analytics reports, content providers are alerted to any performance problems immediately. They are ensured of always having a site whose performance earns high marks from the website crawlers -- leading to better site coverage and more traffic arriving from the search engines."

Yotta: The New Guy in Web Performance Analysis

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:41:00 GMT

Improve the user experience and you improve revenue, right? It only makes sense then that we're starting to see more companies enter a previously shallow pool of performance monitoring services on the market.

The latest is Yottaa which today unveiled a suite of free Web performance analytics tools in public beta (the company also announced the close of a $4 million round of venture funding from General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and CambridgeWest Ventures).

What makes Yottaa unique is that it offers open access and an easy to use service to monitor Web site performance; identify problems such as third-party widgets, network latency or errors with DNS; and track the relationship between performance and business metrics.

“The growing importance of web performance is well documented, from the fact that Google now incorporates page load time into search engine rankings, to Mozilla’s ability to increase Firefox downloads by 15 percent, simply by decreasing load time by 2 seconds,” said Coach Wei, Yottaa’s founder and CEO.

Yottaa’s first product, Yottaa Insight, is available in beta now and allows users to monitor, analyze and improve site performance -- for free.

As site performance becomes an increasingly important factor to boost conversion rates, influence search engine rankings and increase overall user engagement, it's time to start thinking about the ramifications of a slow-loading website.