subject: A Complete Guide For Retail Web Site Making Part-3 [print this page] Best practice: Build pages lean Best practice: Build pages lean
Performance management starts with how the pages are built, which often presents a dilemma for retailers. With more and more products approaching commodity status and available at multiple online outlets, site experience becomes a key differentiator. Retailers want to create a rich experience for visitors with interactivity, dramatic product presentation, perhaps Flash, personalization or other features to set themselves off from the competition. But a heavy load of features and functionality can drag site performance down, often because of third-party content, and, instead of making visitors sticky, can drive them to leaner, faster competitive sites.
Ideally, its best to focus on limiting your number of third-party content and domains on each page to roughly six domains at most, says Keynote Consulting Manager Cliff Crocker. As opposed to what we see for a lot of retailers, where theres 20 or 30 different domains that are killing performance on their page.
Crocker also recommends keeping the number of objects on a page to 40 or 50; many retailers are packing their pages with 150 or more elements.
You have to try to limit the time thats being spent in the browser, Crocker says. The more JavaScript and the more functionality a retailer adds to their page, oftentimes can create very big delays within the users browser compatibility.
Factor mobile in from the start
The successful retailers this year will have built mobile into their strategy right from the startnot just as an afterthought to the main site, but side-by-side with it. Shoppers carrying smartphones are using them to check prices, locate products, find deals, look at reviews and, more and more, to make purchases. (See Shoppers, Start Your Smartphones! in Benchmark.) Many retailers were surprised at the amount of mobile traffic they got during the 2009 holiday season. And there will be millions more smartphones in the hands of shoppers this year.
We were very surprised, says Lacostes Miller. And I think thats where we really realized that we need to focus on [mobile] for 2010. We already knew we needed to focus on it, but I think [the 2009 season] was just really additional proof and we knew that it needed to be a huge part of our strategy for this year, and then continue to be part of our strategy going forward.
Because of the inherent slowness of cellular networks and devices, mobile sites need to be even leaner and meaner than wired Web sites. It takes some hard decision-making and analysis of what is essential for users when they are browsing on the go and what it takes to satisfy them, including their need for speed. Search results can be confined to return four or five results, for example, instead of the 40 or 50 that might be delivered on the wired Web. And perhaps tracking pixels are needed only on the landing page and cart page, instead of every page on the site.
There are some pretty strict rules around how many elements you want to have on a mobile page, Crocker says. Where we say 40 to 50 over the wired Web, were looking at 8 to 10 elements on a mobile page, just because of all the latency thats encountered over the carrier networks. So step one is, youve got to build a dedicated mobile site. Theres no way youre going to port what youre putting up on the wired Web or pare that down. Youve really got to build it from scratch.
