The state of e-commerce websites – Part 2: Categories & Sub-categories

In this post I have collected the performance of the first category and then a further sub-category from the sites I am looking at.

I let webpagetest test run each test 10 times to get a better average – This is still not that scientific but hopefully will be a little more representative. At some point I will go back and do the same for the home pages.

Now we are off the home page, we should be getting into areas that more represent the architects and engineers work.

Some things to call out on the Category Pages are:

  1. Barnes and Noble first view time is nearly double that of everyone else – This appears to be caused by downloading nearly 40 JS and CSS files before getting to an image. Seriously, there are 36 javascript files and 12 CSS files called by this page. Also, the CSS and JS are intermingled so that they can’t even get the CSS to download in parallel.
  2. CB2 has the largest initial payload at ovr 1MB. The main component of this appears to bet the VisualCart.swf coming in at 493KCB2 - VisualCart.swf Size
  3. Crate & Barrel and Sephora come in with over 90 repeated requests when the category page is called for the 2nd time. This is nearly 3 times more than Amazon, which at 33 still has nearly 20 more requests than the next highest.
  4. Amazon and Sephora both have over 100K in requests for a subsequent download. This seems a little high, although it will take a little more research to identify what is being reloaded that is not being cached

The spreadsheet is embedded below.