Internet Retailers and Website Performance

How many seconds does it take to lose a shopper to a competitor’s site? How long will a business user wait for Javascript to execute so she can see the data she’s searching for? How many times will a user tolerate delays in downloading a bank transaction, or registering a bid, or completing a form, before they abandon the site?

The cost of poor site performance is not just lost visitors, it’s lost money. In a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of Internet retailers correlate poor site performance with lost revenue, and more than half with lost traffic.

Just a few short years ago, evaluating website performance was a fairly simple affair. “How fast did the page load?” was often the first and last question that needed to be asked. User expectations were far lower, and patience much higher, when the experience of accessing information or making a purchase online was new and different and amazingly convenient.

Today, however, user expectations are stratospherically higher. With the Internet now tightly woven into the fabric of everyday life, and a multitude of Web sites available to satisfy any given need or desire, users expect not only virtually instant page-loads, but fast and flawless execution of transactions and enhanced functionality that delivers a “rich” site experience.  In the intense competition to attract and keep site visitors, web performance is now a critical business driver for site success.

Read More at http://www.keynote.com/benchmark/index.shtml

Enhance Web Performance with Best practices: Methodology & Modeling

To really understand how your website performance will hold up—or not—under holiday stress, and to understand what the experience will be like for users, use an arrival rate methodology and factor in behavior models for the many, many types of users and tasks your site will serve.

Behavior modeling results in numerous permutations (often thousands) combining these variables:

• Familiarity:  experienced users vs. newcomers
• Connection speed:  super-fast FIOS vs. super-slow mobile device, and everything in between
• Latency tolerance:  patience of users with slow site response
• Interaction speed:  complexity of the page to navigate, and attention level of the user
• Tenacity:  willingness of users to stick with a task through completion

Test in the real world—all of it.

To know how your site will perform for users dispersed across the country or the world, load testing must be done over the Internet, from the same geographic locations as your users, not from behind the firewall.  There’s simply no way to simulate the vagaries of Internet backbones, third-party content feeds, CDN performance, and signal transmission through the critical last mile—unless you are at the end of that mile, with a browser.

With testing agents dispersed where your users are, you get an accurate picture of variations in performance, and overcome the danger of looking at averages.  An average page-load time of three or four seconds may seem OK, but that kind of average could mean your page is loading in one second for someone in New York, but taking six or more seconds for someone in Chicago.  And that is not likely to be acceptable.  The solution is to test from multiple, geographically dispersed locations, look at the data, and address any local or regional bottlenecks.

The holiday shopping season is the culmination of many hard hours of work for the IT/Web department.  And no matter how well things are planned, no matter how rigorously everything is tested, there’s always the chance that the unexpected will happen and something will go wrong.  So it makes good sense to have technical personnel on hand and on call during all the critical shopping periods to handle any emergencies, and to have extra computing capacity standing by just in case it’s needed.

Read More at http://keynote.com/benchmark/new_media/article_streaming_for_primetime.shtml

A need for speed on mobile websites

While the majority of smartphone users want to shop with their phones, only a small minority of retailers offer either mobile apps or websites. One study puts the number of mobile-friendly retailers (app or site) at 32 percent; another counts less than 5 percent of retailers with a mobile-specific site.

Retailers need to catch up in a hurry. The smartphone tipping point was officially reached in spring of this year, according to Nielsen, with 55 percent of new cell phone purchases now being smartphones. Smartphone users express a strong preference to use their phones to shop, but a majority of them find the mobile shopping experience unsatisfactory — 54 percent say mobile apps and sites are “ineffective and difficult to use.”

A Harris Interactive study found that, of adults who conducted a mobile transaction in the past year, 4 out of 5 experienced a problem. And yet 85 percent of the same survey group expects the mobile experience to be equal to or better than using a computer.

It doesn’t have to be such an unsatisfying experience for users. It’s not rocket science to create a mobile site that loads with acceptable speed and delivers the features consumers want. What it requires is a change in mindset from desktop Web thinking to mobile Web thinking. Techniques that make for a rich, and yet still high-performing, experience on the desktop can render the mobile experience painfully slow or even unusable.

The good news is that on the mobile Web, user expectations of content are likely more modest. They are typically more focused on a task — finding an address, getting a price, seeing a product, buying a single item — rather than the more leisurely browsing or immersive experience they might be looking for on a desktop or laptop. So from the start, mobile content can be pared down without compromising likely use cases, so you can already be ahead of the game simply by selectively choosing content for mobile.

Source: http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_speed_up_your_mobile_site.shtml

Retail and an Intro to Mobile Strategy

Mobile Performance management starts with how the pages are built, which often presents a dilemma for retailers. With more and more products approaching commodity status and available at multiple online outlets, site experience becomes a key differentiator.  Retailers want to create a rich experience for visitors with interactivity, dramatic product presentation, perhaps Flash, personalization or other features to set themselves off from the competition.  But a heavy load of features and functionality can drag site performance down, often because of third-party content, and, instead of making visitors sticky, can drive them to leaner, faster competitive sites.

The successful retailers this year will have built mobile into their strategy right from the start—not just as an afterthought to the “main” site, but side-by-side with it.  Shoppers carrying smart phones are using them to check prices, locate products, find deals, look at reviews and, more and more, to make purchases. 

Many retailers were surprised at the amount of mobile traffic they got during the 2009 holiday season.  And there will be millions more smart phones in the hands of shoppers this year.

With regards to mobile website availability, the inherent slowness of cellular networks and devices, mobile sites need to be even leaner and meaner than wired Web sites.  It takes some hard decision-making and analysis of what is essential for users when they are browsing on the go and what it takes to satisfy them, including their need for speed.  Search results can be confined to return four or five results, for example, instead of the 40 or 50 that might be delivered on the wired Web.  And perhaps tracking pixels are needed only on the landing page and cart page, instead of every page on the site.

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The impact of web load testing on performance

What drives the financial impact of a site outage or performance issues is abandonment. It’s important to understand that visitors experiencing a Website with issues don’t result in lost revenue, per se. Only when those visitors don’t return, and/or go somewhere else is revenue lost. A shopper’s tolerance for errors is called “tenacity” in Web load testing parlance. Low tenacity shoppers bail from slow searches and hanging shopping carts in a dash.

If a load test had been run that adequately modeled the impact of the planned launch, the damage would have been done outside business hours and Target management would have been able to decide whether to make changes to their systems and retest, postpone or restructure the launch or just "risk it" and see what happens.  We don't really think they ever had the chance to make those decisions.  Surely they didn't conduct a load test that predicted such an epic fail.  But should they have?

Realistic Web load tests model site usage and shopper behavior. Systems are deployed to simulate high levels of demand from multiple geographically disperse areas. Once the load is generated, the infrastructure and application’s response are watched carefully to identify bottlenecks and breakage points as the entire mesh of the Website’s interconnecting parts are stressed. Only this level of testing can accurately inform e-commerce teams of their preparation adequacy.

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Website Performance: More Than Just Speed

In addition to evaluating customer experience on a subjective level, the Keynote research assessed seven factors related to the site’s service levels:

1. High-Speed Response
2. Dial-up Response
3. Response Time Consistency
4. Geographic Uniformity
5. Load Handling
6. Availability
7. Outage Hours

Car rental sites and the travel sector in general lag in technical quality, page performance, and in the delivery of an error-free user experience. Geographic consistency and load handling as key advantages, users know that wherever they are in the country or what time of day they visit, they can count on consistent website performance.

Three bottlenecks that block traffic that car rental sites, and Web sites in general, need to focus on in order to improve technical performance:

• Too many technical elements on a page: From small non-visual images to java scripts to unnecessary encryption, too many individual elements on a page can stifle site performance

• Java overload: The ubiquitous coding language is an important tool for developers, but every Java script can act like a tiny speed bump for browsers. “Sites may have five, six, seven or 10 JavaScript files in a page, and every time the browser hits that, it slows by almost a factor of two.

• Proliferation of third-party tags: The rising number of third-party tags – DoubleClick ads and calls to third-party analytics services – can also hinder web page performance, minimizing them whenever possible is a good idea. Another option would be to move the tags to the bottom of the page where they are less likely to impact user performance.

Monitoring Web Pages & 3rd Party Content

If you are the owner of the Web site, there are at least two ways to improve overall site performance. One is to optimize the Web site itself for each widget so that those widgets running on the page will be more efficient, a method that is not cost-efficient. The other, more cost-effective option is to use continuous and focused performance monitoring of your Web site. Breaking down performance by time and by component category allows you to pinpoint the components that adversely impact Web site performance.

The benefits of web page monitoing and third-party components are significant indeed. First, operations can target these issues quickly and efficiently, which can reduce potential downtime and loss of revenue. This metric, known as Mean Time to Identification, can be tracked. Second, business unit managers can track the performance of all content, both internal and external, which can establish SLA accountability with the third-party vendors, saving money on lost downtime or the cost of rebates. Another benefit is the accountability that can also be established internally on components and content that has been developed on your site. Third, development and QA teams can save money by tracking these issues in real time. Modifications to code on the Web site or to the widget have been known to adversely affect a previously well-performing Web site, and monitoring can nip these issues in the bud, saving time and therefore money. Finally, the user experience can suffer due to bad website performance. This can cause a loss of viewers, both because of direct experience and by word of mouth. This impact can be potentially devastating to the bottom line.

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