The increased size of the site, said Keynote, has caused its homepage to take far too long to load.
According to the latest Mobile Commerce Performance Index from Keynote Systems, GNC bulked up its smartphone website to such a degree that it dropped its rank down to 28th place out of a possible 30, this week.
The General Nutrition Centers Inc. website is now hurting from impossibly long load times.
The goal of mobile commerce websites, according to Keynote and most other experts in the industry, is to make sure that the site is slim, healthy, and fast. The size should range from 100 kilobytes to 150 kilobytes in order to perform at its best. However, at the end of September, GNC beefed up its site so that it came in at just under 500 kilobytes. Last week, this doubled to a massive 1 megabyte.
The weight of this site for mobile commerce means that it takes over 30 seconds, on average, to load.
For the majority of mobile commerce consumers, 30 seconds is out of the question as a wait time for a homepage. Abelardo Gonzalez, a Keynote mobile performance expert, explained that “This has caused a marked increase in the overall time it takes to load the mobile home page.” He added that “With mobile consumers expecting fast and available sites on their devices when they are on the go, the GNC average download time of just over 30 seconds is fairly unacceptable performance, and very likely caused many potential customers to become frustrated and abandon the site.”
At the time of the writing of this article, GNC had not yet responded to requests for a comment on its mobile commerce site and the changes that have been made.
Last week, the average load time for the mobile commerce site was 31.69 seconds. Its success rate was 95.24 percent, according to Keynote. This data was from the week that ended on October 20. By combining the success rate with the length of time that the homepage took to load, the company was assigned a score of 628 out of a possible 1,000. This dropped its overall rank to 28 out of 30 companies that are tracked by the index.
The top mobile commerce performer during that week was Toolfetch.com LLC, which performed with a lightning load time of 3.43 seconds and that enjoyed a success rate of 98.41 percent, earning a score of 991.
