Across the nation, kids are tossing on their backpacks and hitting the books. School is back in session! As most parents know, though, straight As won’t just materialize out of thin air. They must encourage their children to employ hard-work and diligence at every turn.    Likewise, eCommerce website owners must be hard-working and diligent to ensure that their websites score well on tests like WebPageTest.org’s web page performance test. When a website scores well on performance tests, it will also...

A picture is worth a thousand words – and then some. For those in the eCommerce biz, the quality of a product picture can make or break a sale. Because online shoppers don’t have the opportunity to touch or feel an item before buying it, many rely on product images to help make purchase decisions.   That ability to touch and feel an item is a big part of the draw for brick-and-mortar locations. So recreating those in-store experiences is a...

Consumers are a demanding bunch. And apparently, they’re also a busy bunch. They don’t have time to twiddle their thumbs waiting for a website to load. So, when a website doesn’t render fast enough, they’ll take their business elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. Because of these time-strapped consumers, eCommerce website owners must make performance optimization a priority. Tuning a site to load quickly is a multi-faceted effort, however, seen in the fact that page load performance is often broken into...

Let’s face it. Although there are tons of surveys and research projects focused on issues prevalent to the eCommerce community, there aren’t a lot that drill down on website page performance. That lack of insight has led numerous individuals to continue to reference outdated studies, like the one conducted by Akamai in 2009. Five years ago, when Akamai reported that 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, the eCommerce environment was much different...

When budgets are tight, do-it-yourself projects come to the rescue. In fact, a study released by Lab42, a market research firm, highlighted DIY as one of the top three searches on Pinterest during the 2013 holiday season. Of those surveyed, 15 percent said they spend less money by using Pinterest, “likely due to DIY projects.” So what do arts and crafts projects on Pinterest have to do with eCommerce page load performance? Well, they usher in the idea that slow load times can...