Blue Nile Inc.’s desktop performance sped up by almost a second for the two-week period of Nov. 7-20 compared with last month, according to digital performance analytics company Catchpoint Systems Inc.
This allowed the online jewelry retailer (No. 82 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide) to jump 18 spots to No. 6 from No. 24 on the Internet Retailer desktop performance index. Blue Nile’s desktop home page loaded, on average, in 1.51 seconds, which is less than half the time of the 100-retailer index average of 3.66 seconds, and an improvement from Blue Nile’s 2.33-second average desktop load time in October.
“The website servers were reconfigured and certain images and scripts that had been taking too long to load were removed,” a Catchpoint Systems spokesman says. “All these changes have improved the page performance tremendously.” Blue Nile declined to comment.
Further down on the index, retailers Adidas America Inc. (No. 66), Sears Holdings Corp. (No. 14), Keurig Green Mountain Inc. (No. 94) and Express Inc. (No. 99) had load time improvements of more than one second month-over-month, Catchpoint says.
As a whole, the top 100 retailers maintained desktop speed load consistency month over month, with a site load average time of 3.66 seconds in November compared with 3.69 seconds in October, according to Catchpoint Systems.
For the two weeks of Nov. 7-20, the average page weight was 2.60 megabytes compared with 2.75 megabytes in October, and the average number of hosts was 52 compared with 75 in October. The average number of items was 174 compared with 227 the previous month. The top 100 sites were, on average, 99.52% available for the first two weeks in November compared with 99.77 % availablein October.
Internet Retailer and Catchpoint Systems produce two monthly site 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 website’s home page with measurements taken from Catchpoint Systems’ in-country or in-region monitoring nodes, 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 two week 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 or 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.
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