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The jury is in, and the 2011 holiday season marks the year when mobile shopping entered the mainstream. Over Black Friday weekend, IBM Benchmark reported that for top online retailers:
–15.2% of online traffic came from mobile devices, up from 6.5% in 2010.
–Mobile devices accounted for 11.1% of purchases, up from 4.3% last year.
–IPad users were more likely to buy than other mobile users, with a 4.6% conversion rate versus 2.8%.
While mobile shoppers are now rushing to shop online, they’re as impatient as desktop shoppers. According to Tealeaf, 85% expect sites to load at least as fast on their mobile device as they do on their home computer.
It seems like a no-brainer to assume that site owners are rushing to make their e-commerce sites as fast as possible, but data gathered over the past six months suggests that mobile sites are actually getting slower, not faster. Between April and November of 2011, the Keynote mobile e-commerce index grew from 8.23 seconds to 11.65 seconds. In other words, in just six months the load time of the average mobile site has ballooned by more than 41%.
Many site owners assume that having a simplified mobile-specific site is the solution to this problem, but it’s actually only a partial fix. One out of three mobile users prefer to view the full site when given the option, and who can blame them? When you visit an e-commerce site to shop, you want a rich experience. You want photos, detailed product information, and customer reviews — not a stripped-down minimalist page.
To make your full site faster for mobile users, make sure you follow these best practices:
1. Don’t count on your content delivery network to solve your mobile performance problems. There’s a good chance you’re already using a content delivery network to bring your content closer to your customers on their desktop computers, but many site owners don’t realize that a CDN cannot deliver content faster to mobile devices.
2. Eliminate huge Flash animations on key pages. Large Flash files can seriously slow down page load time, especially on mobile devices, and they rarely serve any purpose.
3. Identify and fix sluggish third-party content. Page analytics, ads, recommendation engines, social buttons — those tiny snippets of code are supposed to add value to your site. But if they’re poorly implemented, they can slow down your page load by several seconds. This problem is even worse for mobile users. Worst yet, if a third-party content provider suffers an outage, it can prevent the entire page from loading.
To address this problem, first audit the third-party content on your site. (The average e-commerce site runs seven third-party scripts. How does yours compare?) Make sure all third-party scripts are designed to load either asynchronously or after your high-priority content.
4. Make sure your site is following two key best practices: “compress text” and “keep-alives.” Compression and keep-alives are core best practices – the low-hanging fruit on the performance optimization tree. They can have a huge impact on page speed, making pages load up to 30% faster. Yet these two simple techniques are frequently ignored. In a survey of the top 1,000 retail sites, 47% were missing out on the opportunity to exploit these techniques. Talk to your developers to ensure that you’re not missing the boat.
5. Remember that site optimization is a never-ending job. Browsers, devices, networks, and sites continue to evolve. This means that mobile site optimization techniques must also continue to evolve, through the holidays and beyond.
