Ever since Matthew Wood posted an article on Google's plans to penalise slow landing pages we decided to look more seriously at how quick IWOOT's page is. We obviously visit our website quite a lot (although Facebook and YouTube tend to get a priority), as does a web usability agency, and we've never had any long-term issues, but it was interesting to find out what the actual standards for these things are.
I've picked 8 online gifts retailers and frequently measured their websites' performance over the past few weeks using a free speed checker. You can see the results below - these are figures for the average loading time in seconds of both the homepage and a product page. (I picked the page of the best product from each merchant from their Top 10 list.) Overall, the results are excellent and show that us online retailers know how to make pages that load within a couple of seconds.
While reading about what an acceptable website speed would be I frequently came across a simple answer - any loading time below 8 seconds. That did seem very strange to me as an 8 second wait would surely push visitor's patience (let alone Google's), so I decided to keep an eye on the top UK websites and use those as a benchmark. What the speed checker showed was that popular sites such as Hotmail, eBay, BBC News and Facebook tend to load in about or just under one second on average. This is good news again, as it means we aren't lagging behind the big boys at least in this respect and we shouldn't worry about Google penalising us or affiliates.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that the above figures may not be entirely accurate as they depend on the speed checking tool and the times of day/week that I used it. Also they may not be representative and shouldn't be used as indication of web usability as we all have different elements loading at different times and carrying different importance on our websites. That's it, I just don't want anyone to sue me!
Bookmark This:
3 comments:
This is quite interesting, and it's reassuring that merchants are actually looking into these kinds of things. I'd be very interested to see how the sites perform in December though when the traffic increases ten fold..
How do you guys deal with that on your end? I can tell you from an affiliate point of view that it's quite frustrating directing traffic somewhere that is failing to cope with the increased traffic. It's hard to tell, but there must be a lot of sales missed out on due to slow loading sites, especially during peak periods. Do you guys have some kind of plan in place that will keep you fast and efficient come christmas time?
April 1st - Off topic, but I would just like to say that you're all very cruel iWoot, very cruel indeed. I am of course talking about the latest joke products on your site. The problem is that a lot of them are just on the right side of plausibility, so if you're not paying full attention it's easier to fall for them than you think! So congratulations iWoot, I'll be more prepared next year!
- Jimmy Muggins (iWoot affiliate)
Hey Jamie
Glad you liked the IWOOT April Fools products! :)
I've made a post here:
http://iwoot.blogspot.com/2008/04/april-fools-at-iwoot.html
Featuring some of the ones I liked.
Enjoy All!
Post a Comment