Now we are getting down to the nitty gritty of e-commerce websites. Once you are through the shop path you are at the point where you can really start to purchase things – The product page. Because there may be a variety of information about the product, zoomable views, additional images, personalization options and shopping functionality – These pages tend to have more scripts and so tend to be larger than other pages.
Now, we may not always be comparing like with like here. product pages on a site may have different capabilities, some may have video, some will have customer reviews (More on the 3rd parties providing these services later), some may have multiple product options and we have already mentioned alternate / zoomable views.
Items of note wile doing this post were:
- Macys site was unavailable when I first tried it
- PageSpeed does not like some pages e.g. at Crate & Barrel and Best Buy and so i could not get a PageSpeed score
Items of note in performance were
- GAP – Similar number of page items to Amazon and a faster return visit time – Although, I am mainly looking at the Document complete point here. If we wait until document loaded they have had quite a bit more time and page weight, but still a good time to DOM complete and good postponement of processing. We’ll look at that in detail another time
- Sephora again comes in with a high number of requests to get to DOM complete for subsequent requests
- A good few pages took more than 10 seconds to get to DOM complete on our ADSL from Virginia test
- Williams-Sonoma got a rather easy page with no video or other heavy pieces. Will re-run on a video page, however the cores on Y!Slow and PageSpeed are still good