It was a long fall for the mobile commerce site home page of Walgreen Co. this week. The retailer tumbled from No. 4 to No. 20 on the weekly Internet Retailer-exclusive Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.
A drop in availability was the culprit, says Matt Agnoli, mobile performance evangelist at mobile and web performance testing, monitoring and analytics firm Keynote. The mobile home page loaded in 7.03 seconds and had a success rate of only 95.34%—down 3.44 percentage points from 98.78% a week earlier. The average for the 30 retailers on the index was 98.34%.
Walgreens also occasionally loaded to smartphones a much larger and more complex version of the mobile site, not redirecting to the typical m.walgreens.com URL, Agnoli says. He says this is common if a retailer is doing A/B testing, but he was not aware of Walgreens doing any such testing.
The larger version of the site that was loaded last week was prohibitively large. “This alternate site is very large at almost 1 megabyte and has over 100 server requests,” Agnoli says “This far exceeds Keynote’s recommendations for mobile sites, which should aim to be 300 kilobytes or less in size and have 30 or fewer requests.”
The occasional appearance of this larger site negatively affected the availability of Walgreens’ site because of the increased size and number of timeout errors, where a page takes so long to load the server stops trying. “It’s definitely time for Walgreens to start working with its content delivery network partner to ensure that the critical assets on the site are served reliably over all mobile networks,” Agnoli says. “Users will have a much more negative experience if the much larger, slower mobile site is loaded rather than the typical mobile site. Let’s see how Walgreens does in the coming weeks to regain its ranking.”
Walgreens did not respond to a request for comment.
Sears Holdings Corp. topped the index with a load time of 2.04 seconds and a success rate of 99.80%. The Sears m-commerce site home page contains seven page elements that together weigh 50 kilobytes.
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.
Favorite