The Yottaa team is on the road again! Seattle this week welcomes the online retail world for Shop.org Summit 2014.

We wanted to see what characteristics and user experiences our fellow attendees had, and tested a whole bunch (around 400).

We found that Shop.org attendees – at least the sample we had – are actually better than average for top retailers in user experience.  Their Time to Interact (a measure of a fully loaded page) is 6.89 seconds – well under Radware’s recent finding of 10.7 seconds.

But unfortunately, that’s still far below the acceptable level for many users.  The two-second page load threshold, while a little arbitrary in our opinion, is an indicator of very good performance, and only three apps were under that mark. Congrats to ShopJimmy.com, FootSmart.com, TJmaxx.com!

But those businesses weren’t all alone — in fact the top 20 sites by Time to Interact average 2.1 seconds. Not bad.  And when you look at how they are built, you can see why.  This table compares the average Shop.org attendee and the average top 20 Shop.org attendee for some broad application performance categories.

Site weight and complexity are still rising out of control – and you can see that the companies who are winning the performance game look a lot different than “average”.  They have less than half as many app assets, less than half the number of images, and less than half the overall application weight — and all these add up to an average page load time less than third of average.

Would You Crack the Top 20?

It may seem simple to pare down site complexity in the name of performance. But when you’re starting with over 150 images (hey ColeHaan.com) or over 60 JavaScript files (I see you, Kohls.com) it can be daunting.  Old habits die hard. But we’re here to help.

Come by our booth, 838, and see how your site compares to these benchmarks. We have experts on hand who love to talk user experience and performance. And if you’re proud of your performance, you can paste your company name on our billboard of user experience glory:

See you at the exhibition!