The retailer slashed 8 pages from its smartphone friendly site and reduced its load time by a second.
According to the latest weekly report from Keynote Systems, Dick’s Sporting Goods has made some important mobile commerce website improvements that have considerably helped its performance.
The Keynote report said that the retailer has made a number of reductions and is headed in the right direction.
For the week of the report, the mobile commerce website was able to bring its page load time down to 12.13 seconds, said Keynote. This was the result of a number of changes that were made to the site’s homepage on March 21. Among those changes was a reduction of the number of objects on the homepage from 36 to 28, which chopped a full second off the load time for that page.
Keynote did point out that there are still some important mobile commerce performance steps to be taken.
It noted that the Dick’s Sporting Goods website had some important objects removed, such as JavaScript files and Cascading Style Sheet, which produced some very positive results. According to a web and mobile performance expert at Keynote, Joe Flake “At just over 12 seconds to load, Dick’s is still a bit slower than the single-digit times posted by the leaders on the index, but it’s a nice step in the right direction.”
Flake went on to add that “Dick’s makes a number of analytics calls. In fact, they may be on the cusp where these analytics calls become significant to the overall page load time.” He pointed out that the outcome of having made those analytics calls is generally buried among the various large objects that are found on a desktop page. However, he explained that on a mobile commerce page, as the number of objects drops, the time required for an analytics call becomes considerably more significant.
According to Flake, there is a “valid tradeoff” between performance and analytics that should not be ignored. Analytics calls are invisible to consumers, and a solid page design should place those calls at the end of the loading of a page. The reason is that by doing it this way, all of the visible elements of a webpage will have been presented to the consumer and he or she may not even notice the additional required load time for the mobile commerce page, because it is only invisible elements.
