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. 

Yottaa is excited to be hosting a series of webinars with our good friends at Jirafe, the e-commerce analytics softare provider.  (In the first webinar we covered 11 ways you can speed up your site.) For the second webinar in the series, Jesse Middleton from Jirafe joined Bob Buffone and Ilya Mirman from Yottaa to discuss a variety of site performance metrics that we think website owners everywhere should be keeping tabs on. 

As kids, the primary function of Halloween is to score as much candy as possible. But many adults use the holiday as an opportunity to brag about their assets -- whether it be an excuse to blatantly flash more cleavage (really, is there any police role that warrants THESE uniforms?) or to provide a forum for nerds to document their own cleverness.

In the latter category, I was impressed by the fully functional Pac Man arcade game below, which is crafted out of a regular laptop computer and some plywood (DIY instructions are in Make Magazine).

Most Halloween revelers, however, are not so creative. Millions of costumes get purchased online, a place where you can temporarily explore your fantasies without being judged (until the party, of course).

Getting in the holiday spirit, Yottaa ran 16 dramatically diverse costumes (including one for dogs) through WebsiteTest.com, our free tool that lets you measure your e-commerce site’s speed against the competition and pinpoint areas needing improvement.

This morning we teamed up with our friends at Jirafe, an awesome e-commerce analytics software provider, to give a webinar on WPO best practices.  Presenting were Jesse Middleton, Director of Business Develepment at Jirafe, and Bob Buffone and Ilya Mirman, our CTO and VP of Marketing. 

We covered:

1. Commerce web: performance challenges
2. Key Metrics & reliable measurements
3. Common performance bottlenecks
4. Performance optimization techniques

Here's a video of the presentation in its entirety: