Wayfair.com, the home goods and furniture e-retailer known as CSN Stores until last year, added technology to its site last winter that it says helped drive a 17% increase in the average number of page views per visitor.

The technology, from Limelight Networks Inc., helps Wayfair.com and AllModern.com, another Wayfair-operated e-retail site, prioritize and quickly load the web page content it deems most important to driving sales, like pictures, so consumers can dive right into shopping while page content deemed less critical continues to load. 

“Online shoppers don’t want to wait—they want to engage and interact with sites instantly,” says Steven Conine, Wayfair’s co-founder and chairman. “We knew that our sites could have a stronger impact if we delivered the most important and desired content first.”

Limelight Networks’ Accelerate service combines instructions on a web page so the page makes fewer requests to web servers for content, and prioritizes the order in which those requests are made. This means content Wayfair wants consumers to see first will render first.

Wayfair measured the 17% improvement in average page views after one month of using the service. “It’s clear that our improved site performance created a more satisfying shopping experience for our customers, which ultimately affects our brand and our bottom line,” Conine says.

Wayfair, as CSN Stores LLC, is No. 51 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

Tim Kilroy, Wayfair’s director, business development, will explain how retailers can boost their search engine rankings in a session titled “Not last year’s SEO: New rules to raise rankings” at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2012 in Chicago in June.