L.L. Bean is not regularly one of the top mobile sites on the weekly Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index. But, the retailer made some significant changes to its mobile commerce site this week that have made a big difference in terms of performance.
The first thing the retailer did, says Matt Agnoli, mobile performance expert at mobile and web performance testing, monitoring and analytics firm Keynote, was drop the page weight of its home page by 5 megabytes, a big change in the mobile realm. The resulting mobile home page weight is still 3.5 megabytes, more than 10 times the Keynote recommendation, but less than half of what it was. Keynote says retailers wanting fast-performing sites on smartphones should limit mobile web pages to 50 elements weighing 500 kilobytes when on 4G LTE or Wi-Fi connections, 30 elements weighing 300 kilobytes when on 4G connections, and only 10 elements weighing 100 kilobytes when on 3G connections.
Part of that reduction was due to a new way of handling images. “The L.L. Bean site was occasionally loading a very high number of large, uncompressed product images on the home page rather than on its respective product category pages,” says Agnoli. He says the retailer changed that on Sept. 2, and now uses compressed images on the home page and saves the full-size images for products pages.
L.L. Bean did not respond to a request for comment.
L.L. Bean was No. 27 on the Keynote index for the week ending Sept. 7—a one-spot jump from the previous week. Its mobile home page loaded on average in 22.81 seconds and did so completely and successfully 99.57% of the time.
Sears Holdings Corp. topped the index with a load time of 1.77 seconds, a success rate of 99.90%, and a perfect score of 1,000. (Keynote equally weights and combines load time and success rate to achieve a score). The Sears m-commerce site home page contains seven page elements that together weigh 50 kilobytes, a far cry from 3.5 megabytes.
To see complete results (including response time, site availability, page weight in kilobytes, total page elements, and index score) for all 30 retailers on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index, click here.
Keynote measures, exclusively for Internet Retailer, 28 stand-alone m-commerce sites optimized for smartphones and two responsive design sites, which are single sites that render content in ways that fit the screen size of a device, including desktop PCs, tablets, smartphones and smart TVs. For the index, Keynote measures the smartphone versions of the responsive sites.
The 30 representative sites include merchants in multiple categories and channels, and of multiple sizes, ranging from such giants as Amazon.com Inc. to mid-sized retailers like Toolfetch.com LLC. Keynote tests the sites in the index every hour Monday through Sunday from 8:00 a.m. through midnight EDT, emulating the Apple iPhone 5 smartphone on two wireless networks: AT&T and Sprint, both using 3G, 4G and 4G LTE networks. Keynote runs the tests in Dallas, New York and San Francisco.
Keynote combines a site’s load time and success rate, equally weighted, into a single score. Given that both performance and availability are important, the score reflects the overall quality of the home page; a higher score indicates better performance. Scores also reflect how close sites are to each other in overall quality. The index average score is the midpoint among all the sites’ scores. To consistently rank high on the Keynote index, sites must hit availability targets of 99.5% or better and be faster than 10 seconds to load on average. Top-performing sites load in under five seconds.
Today, 20% of U.S. Internet-enabled mobile phone users have 4G or 4G LTE wireless data connections, 71% have 3G, and 9% have 2G, according to research firm Informa Telecoms & Media. And according to research and consulting firm Deloitte, 63% of U.S. smartphone users most often connect to the web on their devices on a Wi-Fi network.
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