After having made dramatic changes to its mobile website, Bloomingdales failed to experience the positive results that it was seeking.
The problem was found to be the amount of content that was available on the site. The issue is that the greater the amount of content that is added to a mobile site, and the larger the number of features it offers, the slower that page will load on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.
Since the Bloomingdales site included a great deal of content and features for its users, its performance suffered, as mobile users are notoriously impatient about their page load times.
The changes made to the mobile commerce site for Bloomingdales sent it plummeting from the fourth position, according to the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.
Mobile performance expert, Joe Flake, from the Keynote Systems Inc. a mobile and web performance management company, said that the changes made to the mobile site for Bloomingdales included the growth of the homepage from having about 17 different elements that were a total 40 kilobytes in size, to a much larger 50 elements at a total 500 kilobytes.
This significantly slowed the load times for the pages. He also noted that “Success rate was also affected as a result of outlier timeouts.”
Elements on a webpage are various types of objects, such as text boxes and images. Timeouts occur when a page fails to load. The outliers to which Flake referred were timeouts that occurred outside of typical incidence. Even a tiny number of timeouts can have a significant impact on the overall success rate of a mobile site.
