Mobile commerce website performance at Foot Locker drops through the floor

foot locker mobile commerce

foot locker mobile commerceThe latest report from Keynote Systems has shown a massive drop in the site’s availability.

The most recent Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index report has just been issued and has shown that Foot Locker has taken a considerable dive in its website performance.

The retail chain experienced a very slow homepage load time at 17.42 seconds in the most recent week.

This is a considerable decline from the Foot Locker’s previous mobile commerce site performance. For instance, in October 2012, it had achieved the number 1 position on that same index, as its homepage was loading within 10 seconds. It was accomplishing this goal at a rate of 100 percent of the time.

However, the mobile commerce site performance has changed directions for the worse since then.

The index recorded that during the week that ended on April 28, 2013, Foot Locker’s homepage load time was an average of 17.42 seconds, and it was only able to load successfully 93.42 percent of the time. This is a devastating drop in performance and has placed the company in the very last position on the index, which includes 30 different retailers.

According to Keynote, the mobile commerce website was redesigned by the company and the old high performer was replaced by a much more complex and heavy version. Keynote mobile performance evangelist, Herman Ng, said that “The newly designed site has double the number of page objects and triple the amount of kilobytes.”

Ng also mentioned that “Another factor that appears to be slowing down its mobile home page is that it now has multiple objects coming from third-party domains, and some of them have a much slower average load time compared with page objects hosted on the Foot Locker domain.”

Though there is a content delivery network being used by Foot Locker in order to make its page loads faster, but even with that additional assistance, the mobile commerce website is still not performing, partly due to the fact that the third party content providers are not necessarily using these same tools to ensure speed, Ng pointed out. He also said that the availability of the site experienced the greatest fluctuation among any of the index sites.