‘Retail mobile sites made the most speed gains on this week’s Mobile Speedometer, a weekly performance index ranking 19 mobile sites by speed.

Both Amazon.com Inc.’s and Sephora USA Inc.’s mobile sites rose on the index to No. 2 and No. 7, respectively, for the week ending May 29. The previous week Amazon ranked No. 3 and Sephora ranked No. 10.

Both retailers reduced their load times by 50 milliseconds, which, while may been like a small amount, is a significant change, a Catchpoint Systems spokesman says. Digital performance analytics company Catchpoint Systems Inc. provides the Mobile Speedometer performance data about how fast mobile home pages load  exclusively to Mobile Strategies 360 each week.

“Milliseconds matter,” a Catchpoint Systems spokesman says. “As brands actively work on incremental load time improvements, especially in the highly competitive retail category, seemingly small gains represent significant advances.” Sephora declined to comment and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s mobile site also made meaningful progress in its page load time, coming in at 3.06 seconds this week compared to 3.15 seconds the week before. However, Wal-Mart retained its No. 17 spot near the bottom of the index.

advertisement

The top five performers for the week are:

Find out where the other companies fell by viewing the full index here.

Travel sites again fell toward the bottom of the list, and as a category averaged a 2.51-second mobile site home page load time. The index average is 2.10 seconds.

advertisement

“The travel category demonstrates the challenge of delivering robust, content-rich sites and fast webpage load times,” the Catchpoint spokesman says.

The Mobile Speedometer index monitors 19 sites across travel, retail, financial services, dining and entertainment, and healthcare. The 19 mobile sites were selected by the editors of Mobile Strategies 360.

Catchpoint Systems monitors each mobile website’s home page with measurements taken from 27 Catchpoint Systems backbone monitoring nodes across the U.S., at intervals of two minutes between Sunday to Sunday each week. Backbone monitoring nodes are the locations of Catchpoint’s devices that are near data centers of the main Internet Service Providers that provide service to a city. The nodes simulate end-user contact with each website.

advertisement

Catchpoint monitors webpage load time, availability, hosts and items. They are defined as follows:

Webpage load time: The time it takes for enough page elements to load for a consumer to begin interacting with a page, such as searching, tapping or scrolling. From a consumer point of view, the time it takes for the progress bar or spinning wheel to stop.

Availability: The percentage of time during the test week that the site can be successfully reached by a consumer.

Host: Any domain that delivers data, content or services over the Internet to the site.

advertisement

Items: Also known as requests. Webpage components, such as files or images, that a page loads from internal and external hosts or domains. These can include PDFs, PNGs, JPEGs and GIFs.

The companies are ranked each week based purely on their webpage load time on 4G networks.

For the week ending May 29, the average mobile site page load time was 2.10 seconds compared to 2.04 seconds the previous week. The mobile average site page weight was 1.09 megabytes compared to 1.06 the previous week. The average number of hosts was 23 compared to 22 the previous week. The average number of items on the home page was 81 compared to 80 the previous week. And the percent of the time the mobile sites were available was 99.97% compared with 99.98% the previous week.

 

advertisement
Favorite