Like holiday weight gain and the height of our rapidly growing children, so many things in life at some point or another must be measured. Website performance rates, however, are one item that doesn’t fall under the “at some point or another” category. The performance of a site should be constantly gauged and analyzed.  As one would expect, there are several methods for measuring website performance. Additionally, there are several components of performance that can be measured individually.  Time To First...

Kind of like the old geezer behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, back-end applications on an eCommerce website help to drive the magic happening on the front-end. So like Dorothy and her entourage, eCommerce website owners must pay attention to what’s happening behind the scenes. That’s because, for front-end applications to work, they must make requests to back-end applications, like a database, to pull all of the dynamic content together for a page to be rendered at the client...

When a website is slow to load, consumers are quick to leave. And when consumers don’t stick around, revenues suffer. According to an often-cited study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, something as minimal as a 1-second delay can result in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and a 7 percent drop in conversions. For most business owners, a 7 percent decrease in online sales is motivation enough to improve page performance. Unfortunately, however, sales aren’t...

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 That lack of insight has led numerous individuals to continue to reference outdated studies, like the one conducted by Akamai in 2009.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...