Top retail websites continue to under perform

The UK’s top retail website are taking longer to load, risking poorer conversion rates, reduced customer satisfaction, and ultimately less revenue, according to new figures from web performance experts NCC Group.

The quarterly Retail Benchmark, which analyses the UK’s top 50 retail websites, reveals that overall load times increased to an average of 14.59 seconds, compared with 14.11 seconds in Q4 2015. Load time is important as it is also a ranking factor for search engines, and retailers risk slipping down search results pages as they get slower.

In addition, the findings also revealed that Speed Index, a measure of the rate at which a web page is displayed, has also been getting steadily poorer.

Commenting on the drop in performance, Ben Daniel, head of professional services at NCC Group’s web performance division, said: “The slowdown in retail websites is partly driven by more content. Although this content is often used to make websites more engaging, a page that relies on a lot of large files, such as images and video, will generally take longer to load.

“While average page size actually dropped slightly, from 2.2MB in Q4 2015 to 2.1MB in Q1 2016, the overall trend is still upwards, with pages nearly 18 percent bigger than they were a year ago.”

The report also noted that both the fastest and the slowest sites have suffered and the gulf between them is widening. The five fastest sites in Q1 2016 were nearly two seconds slower to load than the five fastest in Q1 2015, but the five slowest were nearly nine seconds slower.

Image: Marks and Spencer website