3 Ways E-Tailers Can Make Their Sites Faster

According to a 1999 study by Zona Research, the time an average user was willing to wait for a page to load was eight seconds. Seven years later, that number decreased to four seconds. By 2010, 57 percent of online shoppers would abandon a page after waiting three seconds for it to load.

What makes a page slower? Performance culprits are a page's size and complexity, which typically translates to slower load times. Currently, of the top 100 retail websites as ranked by Alexa.com, the median page is 1354KB in size and contains 108 resource requests. Images comprise 50 percent to 60 percent of the average page's total weight. Of the top 100 sites, 43 percent failed to compress their site's images, which is a core optimization technique.