Ever since Google announced in April of 2010 that they were introducing speed as a signal in their search ranking algorithm, speed has got a lot more attention from etailers. Google’s own research had long since proven there’s a correlation between searches per user and speed. A/B testing from Ecommerce sites have also proven there’s an impact on revenue and also on operational costs. The question for retailers is just how important is speed to their site and what should they do about it? This webinar will attempt to answer these questions and others such as: How fast is fast enough? How can I measure the impact of speed on conversion metrics? What’s the impact of speed on SEO? How can I improve the speed of my site at a reasonable cost?

1. www.blaze.io

2. Agenda Introduction User expectations for speed Impact of speed on conversions Impact of speed on SEO Tips for improving performance 2

3. User Expectations 3 Source: Forrester Research

4. Impact of Speed on Conversions 4 Research from Gomez showed that reducing load times from 8s to 2s increased conversions by 74%

5. Impact of Speed on Conversions Research from usability consultancy, Nielson Norman Group, showed that users were 20% more likely to click on a promotion offer when the page loads instantly vs. in 8 seconds 5

6. Impact of Speed on Search 6

7. Shopzilla.com Shopzilla improved speed by 5 seconds Improved conversions by over 7% 7

8. Superbiketoystore.com Reduced NA load times from 6.8s to 3.0s. Reduced International load times from 16s to 6s. Results - improved conversions by 32% 8

9. Measuring Business Impact of Speed Add the new tracking code to your website: http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1205784&topic=1120718 Make sure you are in the new Google Analytics Go to the site speed category & select a date range that you have speed data for. Go to the advanced segments dropdown and check “all visits” & “visits with conversions” 9

10. Measuring Business Impact of Speed Review your average load time for all visits vs. visits with conversions to see the effect of load time on users that converted vs. your regular website visitors: 10 In this example users that converted had an average load time of 4 seconds. All visits had a load time average of 9 seconds

11. Speed and SEO In April 2010 Google started using speed as a signal in their ranking algorithm. Penalizing pages deemed as “slow”. 11

12. How Can I See My Results? Log on to your Webmaster tools page in Google See the chart for your site Google views pages slower than 1.5s to be slow 12

13. How Google Measures Data is collected from the Google toolbar of users. Doesn’t use the Google spider to measure. Measures complete load time of page measured by “onload” event. 13

14. Improving Performance 14

15. Measuring Performance Challenges Not as simple as it sounds Need to test using conditions that reflect your actual customer. Factors to consider: Connection speed Location Browser version Clear vs. primed cache Internet traffic & variability from 3rd parties 15

16. Measurement Tools Commercial tools Keynote, Gomez, Catchpoint Free tools Webpagetest (desktop) Mobitest (mobile) Bad ideas: Manual measurement 16

17. Webpagetest.org Free service Uses real browsers Multiple locations Multiple speeds Detailed results Video playback 17

18. Analyzing Results 18

19. What to Measure? 19 Fully Loaded (4.350 sec) Filmstrip View

20. Mobile Performance 20

21. Prioritizing Improvements 21 Backend = 0.398/7.964 = 5% Frontend = 95%

22. Prioritizing Improvements Backend: Improve server hardware/infrastructure Improve backend code Frontend: Add a CDN to reduce network latency Optimize frontend code (FEO) 22

23. CDN vs. DSA vs. FEO 23 Content delivery networks (CDN), Dynamic site acceleration (DSA) and Frontend optimization (FEO) are complimentary technologies that all work together to boost performance.

24. Improving Frontend Performance 24 Make fewer requests Reduce size of requests Increase # of parallel requests

25. Sample Optimizations 25

26. Blaze Product Overview Automated Frontend Optimization Service Dynamically applies optimization best practices Cloud-based service No software or hardware Integrates with CDN services Quick deployment 1 hour or less. No code changes required Optimizations from world’s fastest sites Shared insights from >1M pages analyzed Blaze performance research team Faster, more efficient site

27. Testing Frontend Optimization 27 Run a test on your own site here.

28. Sample Report – Walmart.com 28

29. Thank You