Retail Website Load Times Get 22% Longer in One Year

Between December 2011 and 2012, the median load time for home pages of top North American retail sites (the Alexa Retail 2000) slowed 22% from 5.94 to 7.25 seconds, finds Radware [download page] in a new report. The top 100 sites fared even worse, with load times slowing from 6.4 seconds to 8.23 seconds in that time span, a 28% difference. The researchers attribute the slowdown to increasing page size and complexity, also pointing out that many of the Alexa 2000 sites are not employing best practices for core performance. (more…)