Your website is slow, and you’re wondering why.  Your images could be the problem. Here’s how to find out if it’s what’s ailing you — and your site visitors! 

Convinced it’s not your images? Check out our other posts: Why Your Website is Slow: Poor JavaScript Performance and Why Your Website is Slow: Poor First/Last Byte Performance.

Images make a web page. There, we said it. 

"Are we faster than our competitors?" 

This is one of the first questions that arises in any discussion about web performance. Knowing how your site stacks up against the field is key information for formulating a web performance strategy - and seeing positive results after implementation.

This 24 page eBook presents 9 key tips for getting the most out of performance benchmarking. It includes:

Yottaa and our friends at Amazon Web Services recently teamed up for a webinar that discusses in detail the performance challenges of
today’s web, and how to overcome them. 

We’d like to thank all our attendees – we had some
great dialogue and it turned out to be Yottaa's best-attended webinar yet! If you couldn't attend the live presentation, we invite you now to view a recording of the webinar and slides.  Below, you'll find a preview of what's in the presentation!

First, a history lesson: how trends on the web in the last decade have led to poorer performance, not better performance.

Click Here to Read “Crash Course in SaaS App Web Performance Part #1: Monitoring Trending Data”

The top eCommerce sites in the world are 22% slower than they were last year.

That's bad.

A customer's ideal page load time is less than 3 seconds, and today's top eCommerce sites take 7.25 seconds. That is almost 2 full seconds slower than the average eCommerce site took to load in 2009 (Joshua Bixby).

Why So Slow?

Reason #1: Websites are becoming more complex. They are heavier and more interactive, as they attempt to support third-party integration ("Share this on Facebook") and add powerful visuals (well hello, 2MB worth of images). You might assume, naturally, that as technology improves the performance of your website will automatically follow suit. But what this new technology allows you to do online doesn't change the composition of your website. New technology generally adds to existing site features, rather than replacing them; It's still made up of the same asset types that need to be thoroughly thought out. 

Earlier this month, Yottaa Monitor detected that a number of websites had simultaneous and very similar performance issues.

The proliferation of a single type of performance problem is interesting regardless, but this case was especially urgent: the sites were entirely inaccessible for all visitors.  That’s a big problem. 

Even more alarming was the sheer number of sites that were experiencing downtime. After analyzing the stats, we found that, out of the tens of thousands of sites on Yottaa Monitor, around 3% were affected. In the wider Internet, the percentage was likely similar.  We’re talking millions of sites potentially down for hours. This can have a hugely detrimental impact on conversions, user experience, and website credibility. 

Why order of execution matters

Establishing the proper order of execution on a web page is one of the best ways to ensure a good user experience. This is a case where the term “user experience” is important: it’s a broader concept than simply how fast the page loads. 

Web users today spend more time than ever in SaaS applications.  Here at Yottaa we spend countless hours in the portals of Hubspot, Marketo, GoToMeeting, Dropbox, Slideshare, ADP, Salesforce.com, and more.  This is the “new normal” across many industries and company sizes, in addition to the consumer market. Reports from Gartner and Forrester project sky-high growth for SaaS in the coming years, with the market steadily speeding toward 100 billion dollars annually.

Next-generation Business 

Flash sale retailer customers show a 385% spending growth potential within their first year of being a customer. If this number doesn't mean much to you, consider this: by comparison, customers of traditional online retailers clock in at around 94% (RJMetrics).

About 9 in 10 flash sale shoppers say that after redeeming their most recent offer they either made another transaction with the same company (44%) or plan to do so (47%), making these businesses a hotspot for customer retention and spending growth. 

Online shoppers are generally not going directly to an online retailers website.

Instead, consumers are accessing products online through search engines and price comparison engines such as Google Shopping, Amazon Product Ads and Pricegrabber.