Speed is essential on smartphones. And Vistaprint.com has it.
Vistaprint Ltd., No. 31 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide, has the fastest mobile site among the top 100 online retailers, loading in 0.40 seconds on average between Aug. 1-15, according to digital performance analytics company Catchpoint Systems Inc. RueLaLa.com (No. 80 in the Top 500) is close behind, loading in 0.49 seconds.
To keep tabs on how the top e-retailers perform, Internet Retailer and Catchpoint Systems Inc. will produce two monthly performance indexes, one for mobile sites and one for desktop sites, ranking the 10 fastest retailers out of the top 100 retailers in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide.
Catchpoint Systems monitors each mobile website’s home page with measurements taken from Catchpoint Systems’ 3G and 4G backbone monitoring nodes across the U.S., at intervals of five minutes for two weeks each month. Backbone monitoring nodes are the locations of Catchpoint’s devices that are near data centers operated by the main Internet Service Providers that provide service to a city. The nodes simulate end-user contact with each website. 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.
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 top 10 retailers are ranked based on their mobile webpage load times on 3G and 4G networks.
For the first two weeks of August, the fastest loading mobile sites are run by e-commerce leaders such as Amazon.com (No. 1 in the Top 500), Apple Inc. (No. 2) and Costco Wholesale Corp. (No. 8.), which all secured a spot in the top 10 list.
All of the top 10 mobile sites loaded in 1.50 seconds or less. This is much faster than the average of all top 100 retailers, which was 2.64 seconds.
With only one exception, the fastest retailers also have the lightest home pages, Catchpoint says. The average mobile home page weight for top 100 sites was 1.99 megabytes, while Amazon.com, Apple, Toys R Us Inc. (No. 35 in the Top 500), Sweetwater.com (No. 89), Build.com Inc. (No. 68) and W.W. Grainger Inc. (No. 11) had mobile home pages that were all less than half that average. Surprisingly, fast-loading Vistaprint.com was the exception and had a mobile home page weight of 2.05 megabytes.
“While low page weight clearly correlates to faster load times, Vistaprint bucked the trend and outperformed the rest of the field, probably by leveraging optimization techniques that minimize the impact of heavier site content on performance,” a Catchpoint spokesman says.
Vistaprint applies many performance techniques to improve its mobile performance, such as image and static file optimization, compression, caching and continuous monitoring of performance metrics, says Laban Eilers, of Vistaprint’s technology team.
Vistaprint also experiences gains from focuses on problems that are on the periphery of performance, Eilers says.
“On many mobile sites, when images load, the resulting reflows shift content on the page unexpectedly,” Eiler says. “This is a huge annoyance to users, so we applied a simple CSS trick to prevent this systematically on all our pages. This alone has resulted in a huge win for customer experience.”