WHITE PAPER Global Web Performance Matters More than Ever
Global Web Performance Maters More than Ever TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 User Engagement 2 Revenue Improves by the Second 3 SEO Improves with Speed 4 How to Optimize Performance 5 Conclusion: Drastic Performance Improvement in Just Weeks 12
Introduction Global ecommerce sales are growing worldwide at double digit rates as shown in the Goldman Sachs cart below. At the same time, competition for online shoppers is fierce. Online retailers increasingly rely on media-rich and interactive features for their websites to drive user engagement and revenue. But, unless steps are taken to ensure that site performance keeps pace with these innovations, buyers will not stick around, resulting in damage to the brand and lost revenue. According to a 2013 report, the load time for the top 2,000 retail websites (as ranked by Alexa.com) increased by 22% over the course of just one year. The poor performance was due, in large part, to the higher number of resource requests needed to accommodate greater website complexity and size. The median load time for these sites was 7.25 seconds, more than twice the three-second expectation that users have before precipitous abandonment. 1 Numerous studies show that seemingly minor decreases in performance or uptime have disastrous effects on a business s bottom line. Conversely, websites that consistently deliver a high-quality experience boost return users and drive conversions. These results clearly point to the need for online retailers to optimize website performance alongside user engagement in order to gain competitive advantage. Business professionals who lead their organization s online retail efforts will find this paper valuable. It provides insights into the most effective techniques for improving website performance and their associated impact on user engagement, SEO, and infrastructure costs. 1 Marketing Land, Top Retail Websites Not Getting Faster: Average Web Page Load Time Is 7.25 Seconds [Report], March 26, 2013. Referenced online July 30, 2013 from the following source: http://marketingland.com/retail-website-load-times-continue-to-decline-with-a-22-decreaseduring-the-last-year-37604 CDNetworks 1
User Engagement 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less Engaging site visitors is the primary concern among online retailers today. As competition grows for global online shoppers, many sites are seeking to deliver a holistic, social, and customized shopping experience. To do so, they continually introduce new interactive site features. Here are some of the most popular among online retail sites today: Real-time inventory lookup Configurators Optimized content Animations and Videos Interactive reviews Detailed searching by category and range Larger, enhanced images with zoom and color swatching Automated feedback linking to third-party review sites For these interactive features to provide value, online consumers must first desire to stay on your website long enough to discover them. Unfortunately, too many retailers lose potential buyers before they ever get a chance to engage them with helpful shopping tools, because the website simply takes too long to load or is unresponsive. Today s shoppers have so many online destination choices that they will not hesitate to abandon a poorly performing site and shop elsewhere. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the importance of attracting and retaining consumers with a high-performing site. Consider some of the most recent published data regarding their threshold for site abandonment: 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty. A 1-second delay decreases page views by 11% and customer satisfaction by about 16%. Nearly half of mobile users abandon a site if it doesn t finish loading within 10 seconds. 2 2 Kissmetrics, How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line. Referenced online July 30, 2013 from the following source: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ CDNetworks 2
Ecommerce vendors lose thousands per minute during an outage Unfortunately, poor website performance has a compound negative effect beyond the individual user. Word gets around fast, and according to Forrester Research, 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online. 3 To ensure that eye-catching and engaging content and functionality do not cause more harm than good, retail sites should combine several fairly simple techniques, including: Optimizing website architecture, code, and content Employing a Global CDN to cache non-dynamic content closer to the end users Using cloud acceleration to ensure that dynamic content takes the most direct path, with the least amount of round trips, to the end user Monitoring site performance continuously We will cover more about each of these techniques later in the paper. Revenue Improves by the Second Once you have the user experience down (users fully engaged), it s time to convert shoppers to buyers. According to the Aberdeen Group, a 1-second delay in page-load time not only equals 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, but also a 7% loss in conversions to sales. 4 For an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could potentially cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year. On top of that, even if they do complete a transaction, 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from the same site again. Even large players like Amazon.com are not immune to lost revenue from slow website loading. When Amazon.com experienced a two-hour outage in 2008, it was estimated that the retailer lost $3.7 million, or $31,000 per minute. 5 Now, Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $4.9 million per hour or $81,000 per minute. Page load times matter to ecommerce shoppers. In a recent WalmartLabs presentation, they stated that every one second improvement equals up to a 2% increase in conversion rates and just a 100 millisecond improvement equals up to 1% incremental revenue. 3 Forrester Research, The Big, Ugly Obstacle Holding Back ecommerce, March 29, 2007 4 Aberdeen, The Performance of Web Applications: Customers are Won or Lost in One Second, November 30, 2008 5 Yahoo! Finance, Want to Lose Money? Have a Website Outage, May 20, 2013. Referenced online July 30, 2013 from the following source: http://www.crnbuzz.com/rt/storage_v1/want-tolose-money-have-a-website-outage/6255334b71315249676742303078622f5852506179413d3d CDNetworks 3
This chart, from the presentation, shows conversion rates based on load times. Excessive load times may mean lower search engine ranking When conversion rates drop off, where do those shoppers go? Most likely, the competition. SEO Improves with Speed With Google still holding the number one spot as the most popular search engine in the world by a hefty margin, it s important to recognize that Google uses website load speed as an organic search ranking factor. Google s position is that faster-loading pages should be ranked higher because they provide a better experience for users. The next four most popular search engines China s Baidu, Yahoo, Russia s Yandex, and Microsoft (Bing and Microsoft.com) have not formally announced their position on taking into account load speed, but they will most likely follow suit as they attempt to keep pace with Google. Regardless, as Figure 1 above demonstrates, Google so overwhelmingly dominates search that website owners need to pay far more attention to Google s SEO criteria than that of any other search site. CDNetworks 4
Keep your website free of duplicate content for a faster load time Another factor in SEO is the crawl rate of your site. Search engines budget a certain amount of time to crawl and index website pages. If load times are excessive, the crawler may not get to all new content, leaving some content un-indexed and un-ranked. It almost goes without saying that site availability is a huge factor here. If a search engine bot encounters an unavailable site or page, it moves on. With speed and uptime dramatically impacting the three critical areas of website success SEO, engagement, and revenue generation you need to optimize the performance of your websites to ensure ongoing success and brand relevance. Fortunately, a few simple improvements can make a big difference. How to Optimize Performance As stated earlier, there are four techniques for improving and maintaining robust website performance. This final section of the paper describes each technique and delves into the most critical areas surrounding each. TECHNIQUE #1: OPTIMIZE CODE AND ARCHITECTURE Business professionals at online retailers seldom look into the architecture and code of their sites. Still, you can help ensure optimal site performance by checking that your technical team is taking simple steps to speed your most common page elements (I.e. images, cascading style sheets or CSS, and JavaScript code) and reducing the volume of HTTP requests made to your servers. Minimize HTTP requests One of the simplest and most effective ways to deliver faster web pages is to reduce the number of HTTP Requests. You can do so by employing the following methods: 1. Combine JavaScript: Combining external scripts into as few files as possible cuts down on round trip times (RTTs) and delays in downloading other resources. 2. Combine CSS: Combining external stylesheets into as few files as possible also reduces RTTs and delays in downloading other resources. 3. Combine Images using CSS Sprites: Combining images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites reduces the number of round-trips and delays in downloading other resources, reduces request overhead, and can reduce the total number of bytes downloaded by a web page. CDNetworks 5
A global CDN can reach 99% of the world in a few milliseconds While site and consumer security are important, remember to only use HTTPS secure socket layer (SSL) when absolutely necessary for transmitting secure content. SSL leverages data encryption, which slows site speed dramatically. Put stylesheets at the top and JavaScript at the bottom Moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster, because it allows the pages to render progressively, displaying content as it becomes available. When the browser loads a page progressively, the header, navigation bar, and top logo all serve as visual feedback for the user. For an even better user experience, move as many JavaScripts as possible to the bottom of the page. Browsers won t start any parallel downloads while a script is downloading, making your entire site un-viewable as the script loads. Check those images Image-heavy sites are often the slowest to download, but images are a necessity for nearly all online retailers. Beyond combining images with CSS sprites, you can streamline image loading in other easy ways. First, make sure to use the right file type for the right kind of image. Second, properly size and scale images before you serve them. That way, you don t end up serving a large image only to have it render at half its size. For example, if your image displays at 325 550 pixels, there s no need to send a 650x1000 pixel image to shoppers browsers. It only slows the download and causes site abandonment. Minimize redirects Redirects (301s or 302s) trigger an additional HTTP request-response cycle and add round-trip-time latency. It's important to minimize the number of redirects issued by your application. This is especially problematic for content needed for starting up a page. Therefore, restrict your use of redirects to only those cases where it's absolutely technically necessary. Following are additional things to keep in mind regarding code and architecture to keep your site attractive, robust, and secure without sacrificing page load speed: Delete duplicate and unused HTML and JavaScript code Avoid unnecessary loading of resources / deduplication Use AJAX Pre-load content in the background Load 3rd party assets asynchronously Enable keep-alives Leverage domain sharding CDNetworks 6
TECHNIQUE #2: EMPLOY A GLOBAL CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK A global CDN can handle peak traffic times, such as late November Content delivery networks, or CDNS, cache non-dynamic content close to your website end users so that the most common elements of your site load at top speed. As your online retail site serves more customers across more than one continent and you fight to stave off competitors from abroad, you should leverage a global CDN to cache content close to your users around the world. As shown earlier with the Walmart example, milliseconds make a difference in conversions to sales and therefore revenue. A global CDN will speed up your website by bringing content closer to your customers, no matter where they are located. With the distributed network and points of presence that a global CDN provides, handling peak traffic is also not an issue. The CDN simply distributes the traffic among multiple points of presence to ensure availability and fast load times. Traffic in late November can more than double as the Walmart chart below shows. The need for a global CDN to boost site performance becomes evident when reviewing online shopping trends around the world. emarketer forecasts that Asia Pacific will overtake North America as the number one market in ecommerce sales by year end 2013 and expand its lead through 2016. Already, worldwide B2C ecommerce sales grew 21.1% in 2012 to over $1 trillion, with Asia Pacific accounting for more than 30% of sales. Asia Pacific s growth has been fueled mostly by shoppers in China, but other Asian countries, such as Indonesia, are among the fastest growing ecommerce nations. 6 6 emarketer, Ecommerce Sales Topped $1 Trillion for First Time in 2012, February 5, 2013. Referenced online July 30, 2013 from the following source: http://www.emarketer.com/article/ecommerce-sales-topped-1-trillion-first-time- 2012/1009649 CDNetworks 7
In the chart below you can see the growth of online shopping in Asia-Pacific as a percentage of the overall market. A global CDN saves CAPEX and OPEX over building data centers According to Gartner, serving a global user audience from just one or two data center locations is difficult because of global Internet latency. Gartner states, for example, that average latency between China and the U.S. and China and Europe ranges from 200 to 350 milliseconds and 400 to 600 milliseconds, respectively. 7 Considering all the page elements that must load on today s feature-rich retail sites, latency will continue to present a significant barrier to website stickiness and revenue. This is why Gartner recommends websites use a CDN when serving audiences in Asia Pacific. Global CDNs deliver top performance at the best cost efficiency To serve a global audience, many online retailers have investigated the option of building out their own data centers in different regions. But a brief analysis of cost factors demonstrates the advantages of leveraging a global CDN. Table 1 below highlights the cost factors involved with building out data centers, using Asia Pacific (in- China or near-china) data center costs as a baseline. 7 Gartner, How to Improve Application Performance on China's Internet, June 25, 2010 CDNetworks 8
Table 1. Costs of International Data Center Build-out Fixed costs of building a data center A global CDN can mitigate denial of service attacks Legal fees Real estate Site construction Hardware Web and applications servers Software licenses Capital costs incurred if expansion is required Ongoing data center operating costs Property taxes Heating and cooling (5-10 times Western equivalents) Electricity (5-10 times Western equivalents) Leased lines (3-5 times Western equivalents) Migrations for software updates Personnel costs Several full-time IT staff per country to monitor and manage the network and applications One or two business executives to manage ISP and government relations in each country Expatriate manager to solidify company culture and oversee progress in the most challenging geographies 1-2 administrative staff per country Besides costs, establishing overseas data centers can quickly become a management nightmare. The time and effort required can stall online initiatives and distract the company from its core focus for extended periods of time. By contrast, when using a global CDN, everything is done for you in the areas of website performance, scalability, CDNetworks 9
Cloud acceleration typically reduces page load times by up 20-50% in established markets and 50 200% in emerging markets and ongoing expertise to address changing business, regulatory, and technical requirements. Performance, scale, and agility When it comes to performance, a global CDN can reach 99% of the world within just a few milliseconds. But faster speeds are just part of the benefit. Because a global CDN hosts its servers in dispersed locations on multiple networks, the odds of experiencing site downtime become greatly reduced versus having just a single data center per region. At the same time, global CDNs can absorb unexpected traffic spikes caused by special marketing campaigns and/or malicious hackers launching distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. To prepare a data center for such an event would be cost prohibitive for all but the largest online retail properties. Frequently, Internet traffic patterns change, regulations evolve in various countries, and new consumers from more countries are attracted to your offerings. This means your website architecture must adjust quickly to guard site performance and brand reputation in unforeseen places and ways. A truly global CDN provider will have the expertise on staff to manage these changes without any disruption to the service. Finally, leading CDNs have added application acceleration to their global capabilities in recent years. This proves invaluable to retail sites that incorporate interactive applications, such as social commentary and inventory lookup. They can provide the ultimate local experience to users anywhere in the world without fear of the elements of user experience bogging down page load times. TECHNIQUE #3: USE CLOUD ACCELERATION TO GIVE DYNAMIC CONTENT A DIRECT PATH TO USERS Let s face it. The Internet is inherently unreliable for retail sites, because it was not designed to support fast delivery of the dynamically generated applications found on today's sites. The real problem lies in the Internet s middle mile, which is typically the longest network distance that data must travel between users and a retail site s datacenter. Caching, content delivery, and intelligent routing have little impact on middle-mile performance, because much of the content found in dynamic applications is non-cacheable. This means that multiple round-trips are required between a retail site s origin server and each end user (even more so when an application relies on personalization). A typical dynamic application requires 10 round-trips, so if the middle mile is slow, users will suffer through long delays. Figure 4 below demonstrates how a site that has already been optimized by content delivery or edge caching still experiences a significant drag CDNetworks 10
on page load speed when using dynamic applications because of the Internet s middle mile. Figure 4. The Internet s Middle Mile Drag Cloud-based acceleration improves middle mile performance by reducing the number of data round-trips necessary to complete a web request. There are four major elements of a cloud acceleration service: 1. Resident in the cloud is an optimally-tuned TCP stack 2. Advanced TCP techniques reduce the impact of packet loss and Internet congestion 3. SSL offloads and aggregated connections remove burden from an origin s application servers and databases 4. A pool of open connections maintained between end users and application servers reduces the number of round-trips required to share content and execute features For Cloud acceleration services that maintain a globally distributed network of servers, the edge is never far from any individual end user who accesses a retail site or application. TECHNIQUE #4: MONITOR SITE PERFORMANCE Retail website performance efforts should start and finish with performance monitoring. Prior to employing one or more of the methods we have outlined above, you should measure your website load times and abandonment rates. This will provide you with a correlation between the two as well as a baseline against which you can measure the CDNetworks 11
CDNetworks Global Offices US 441 W. Trimble Road San Jose, CA 95131 +1 408 228 3700 EMEA impact of site improvements that result from use of a CDN, streamlined code and content, and/or cloud acceleration. Performance benchmarking is simple to perform, and there exists a wide range of performance monitoring tools to suit all budgets. You should leverage a performance monitoring to benchmark your own site s performance and also those of your competitors and industry, as you may face a challenge from unanticipated retail competitors from around the world. Juxon House 100 St Paul s Churchyard London, EC4M 8BU +44 203 514 7501 Korea Handong Bldg. 2F,828-7 Yeoksam-Dong, Gangnam-Gu 135-935 Seoul +82 2 3441 0400 Japan Nittochi Nishi-shinjuku Building 8th Floor, 6-10-1, Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0023 +81 3 5909 3369 China Room No.A-1502, Keijidalou, 900 Yi shan Road, Shanghai + 021-54234802 info@cdnetworks.com www.cdnetworks.com CDNetworks. All rights reserved. Conclusion: Drastic Performance Improvement in Just Weeks We have recommended what appears to be quite a long list of items for improving retail site performance. Yet, implementing a CDN with a cloud acceleration service is normally just a matter of weeks, during which time your team can optimize your site code and architecture. In fact, your CDN provider should be able to provide insights into your site code and architecture improvements as well as the impact they will have on page download speed. For online retailers who have adopted these methods, it is not uncommon to realize performance gains of 20-50%. For those targeting the most challenging regions of the world, such as China and Russia, improvements of 50-200% are very realistic, particularly when serving dynamic content to these fast-growing markets. About CDNetworks CDNetworks enables Global Cloud Acceleration. Our mission is to transform the internet into a secure, reliable, scalable and high performing Application Delivery Network. CDNetworks unique position as the only multinational CDN with expertise and infrastructure in China, Russia and other emerging markets, enables us to be trusted partners in local markets, while serving as foremost experts on extending into global markets. Accelerating more than 40,000 global websites and cloud services over our 140 PoPs, CDNetworks serves its e-business customers across industries like finance, travel, ecommerce, learning management, high tech, manufacturing and media. CDNetworks has been serving its enterprise customers for more than 13 years, and has offices in the U.S., Korea, China, Japan, and the UK. For more information, please visit: www.cdnetworks.com. CDNetworks 12