By now, most folks in mobile retail know the common criticism of responsive design web sites: They’re too slow.
Well, they can be. Crack the whip, however, and they speed up.
Fathead LLC, a web-only retailer of life-sized wall graphics and decals of sports and entertainment figures, operates a responsive design site. Responsive design is a technique that enables retailers to build one site using one code base and one set of web content that renders pages to fit in an optimal manner the differing screen sizes of desktops, tablets and smartphones. The most common approach to mobile commerce is building a separate site for smartphones, and sometimes an additional site for tablets. However, more retailers are turning to responsive design: The number of retailers in the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 with responsive design sites grew 164% to 103, from 39 the previous year.
Fathead, No. 293 in the Mobile 500, was operating what’s known as a pure responsive design site, the original flavor. A pure site bundles everything needed to create a web page on desktops and tablets and smartphones and jams it all into one jumbo data package and sends that through the wireless pipes to a mobile device. The other form of responsive design is known as hybrid, where a retailer’s servers first detect what kind of device is requesting a web page and then only send what is necessary to build the page on that type of device.
Big difference. As Fathead found out. Fathead contracted for the web site optimization services of Yottaa, a vendor that specializes, quite specifically, in optimizing web site page load speed and customer conversion. What Yottaa did for Fathead was essentially turn Fathead’s homegrown pure responsive design site into a hybrid responsive site. Yottaa technology detects the size of the viewport (that is, the screen) on a device requesting a Fathead.com web page, then prioritizes content to be sent, holding back content that is not required for that device.
“This technology attacks the fundamental flaw in responsive design, which is sending everything and then hiding a bunch of stuff,” says Michael Layne, director of Internet marketing at Fathead. “It looks at the viewport first and says, ‘Tell me what you need.’”
The result? A 37% decrease in page load times thanks to a 53% decrease in page weight. And, that helped produce a 15% increase in revenue per visitor because mobile customers are not getting frustrated by slow page loads, Layne says. That revenue increase covered the costs of moving to the new system in less than a month. Fathead declines to reveal exact costs, but says Yottaa charges a monthly fee based on traffic volume.
Using Yotttaa site optimization, Fathead knocked its home page “full page” load time on smartphones down from 30 seconds to 18 seconds, Layne says. More important, he adds, Fathead reduced the home page “first render” load time from 7 seconds to 5.5 seconds. This is more important to retailers because “first render” is the time required for a consumer to see most of a page and begin to interact with that page. “Full page” load times start at the beginning of a page load and do not end until every single bit of data is loaded, including things like tracking codes that consumers never see and do not need to use a page.
But Fathead got more than just more dough. Fathead uses the customer satisfaction measurement services of ForeSee. Its ForeSee score from mobile shoppers before it optimized its responsive design site was 83 out of 100—after optimization it rose to 88 out of 100. Layne says he is quite happy with that high score.
Fathead last week launched some new design twists to its site as it renders on mobile devices, specifically with holiday shoppers in mind. 80 Fathead employees tested the site on smartphones and determined fewer text links, more and bigger images (which themselves serve as links), less copy in product descriptions, and images with search results were in order for mobile commerce. Layne says the retailer never would have gone through with these design changes, which he expects to increase mobile conversion, had the merchant not reduced its page load times.
“We would not have made images on the home page and catalog pages and in search results bigger had we not already achieved better site performance,” Layne explains. Bigger pictures mean more page weight means slower page loads. “We met with Yottaa at IRCE in Chicago in June. They quickly did some A/B testing against our baseline. We went with their solution, and saw improvements very quickly. That positioned us much better for mobile commerce going into the holidays. And it allowed us to be more adventurous in our layout of images because we are getting great page load times.”
Fathead says there are further performance improvements to be gained and will continue to work with Yottaa. However, there are some things it will not do, even if it means quicker page loads.
“We have put a big dent in the responsive design flaw,” says Jennifer Rademacher, chief information officer at Fathead. “There are things Yottaa will continue to explore to make performance even better. But there are some things that we, as a brand, might not do. For example, we’re not going to compromise the quality of our images because what we sell are graphics.”
On another note, Fathead has revealed to Internet Retailer the results of its first 2014 holiday promotion, and it involves plenty of mobile commerce. The e-retailer sent an e-mail to about 1.6 million customers who opted in for private sales, offering 50% off doorbusters, 40% off custom products, and 20% off all other products Fathead sells. 19% of sales stemming from the promotion occurred on mobile devices, Layne says.
Follow Bill Siwicki, editor of the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 and managing editor, mobile commerce, at Internet Retailer, at @IRmcommerce.
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