Despite this fact, it has also grown its strength and its performance is still better than other sites.
According to Keynote Systems, even though Sports Authority’s mobile commerce website has gained a great deal of weight, its home page still loads at an average of 9.45 seconds, which is not ideal but it is still superior to other sites on the index.
Keynote feels that the retailer could still achieve far better performance if its homepage shed some weight.
According to the company behind the Keynote Systems Mobile Commerce Index, in order to achieve optimal performance on a smartphone or tablet, a retailer’s homepage should not be any heavier than 100 kilobytes and should not have any more than 25 objects (which can include various different kinds of elements like scripts and images). The Sports Authority’s site has exceeded that tremendously.
The mobile commerce home page for that retailer weights in at more than six times Keynote’s recommended maximum.
On the week that ended on November 10, Keynote found that the mobile commerce site at The Sports Authority was 643 kilobytes and it included 41 different page elements. Even so, it managed to keep its performance somewhat under control. It is among only seven sites on the index – which includes a total of thirty retailers – that have homepages that are made up of over 500 kilobytes of content. It is also one of only ten sites on the index that have over 40 page objects.
According to Keynote mobile performance evangelist, Herman Ng, “Upon examining the data we collected closely we noticed that many of the heaviest page elements are hosted on Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery web service.” He went on to say that this definitely helped the retailer to be able to speed up the load time of its mobile commerce homepage. He also recommended that other retailers consider using a content delivery service in order to reduce the weight of their own homepages and to ensure that they load more quickly.
These services help mobile commerce sites by caching all of a site’s files at several locations nationwide or worldwide so that when a page is requested by a consumer, the data comes from the most local place possible.