American Eagle is the most-improved retailer on the March mobile site index, jumping 90 spots. On average, the top 100 retailers had slower sites in March than in February.

American Eagle flew to the top of the March mobile site index, according to data provided by digital performance analytics company Catchpoint Systems Inc.

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 among the top 100 retailers in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide. The March mobile index monitored sties for the two-week period March 13-26.

American Eagle (No. 63) was the most-improved retailer this month, as it jumped up 90 spots to No. 5 from No. 95 the previous month after it cut its mobile home page load time to 1.50 seconds in March from 6.52 seconds in February. The apparel retailer sped up its site by reducing the weight of its mobile home page to 3.06 megabytes from 5.26 megabytes and trimming the number of hosts (a domain that delivers content to a page) to 37 from 59, Catchpoint says. American Eagle did not respond to a request for comment.

“American Eagle has also cut down on images, redirects and scripts, and these changes were implemented around March 15,” says a Catchpoint spokesman. “There were several embedded videos on the page that were also removed on the same day.”

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The Walgreen Co. (No. 37) also improved this month, and nabbed the No. 1 spot on the index, up 14 spots from the previous month. It reduced many elements on its page, including the number of items and its page size, Catchpoint says.

For the two weeks of March 13-26, the average mobile home page load time for the 100 retailers was 3.26 seconds, an increase from 3.17 seconds the previous month. The average page weight for the 100 retailers was 2.26 megabytes compared with 2.04 megabytes, and the average number of hosts was 45, the same as the previous month. The average number of items was 144 compared with 142 in February. The top 100 e-retailers’ mobile sites were, on average, 99.90% available for the March index compared with 99.55% available for February index.

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:

Web page 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’s point of view, it’s the time it takes for the progress bar or spinning wheel to stop.

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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. Web page 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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