4th August, 2014
4 Min read
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Why are the world’s top e-commerce sites getting slower instead of faster?
WebPerformanceToday tested the load times of the most popular e-commerce sites, finding that the median page takes 49% longer to load than it took a year ago, with only 14% of retailers delivering an optimal user experience. Most sites are not even taking full advantage of performance optimization techniques. The biggest issue of the report is the fact that user expectations aren’t being met.
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The top 100 e-commerce sites’ home page takes 10.7 seconds to fully load. The fastest sites were Adebooks.com (1.0 second load time), Amazon (1.4 seconds) and Adpost.com (1.5. seconds) respectively. The conclusion; adoption of performance best practices is inconsistent. 78% of the sites use a CDN to cache page resources closer to end users, but most sites failed to properly implement image optimization techinques that could significally speed up pages.
Check the details at WebPerformanceToday.
Team in Denmark breaks data transmission rate over single fiber cable—43 terabits per second
A team at Denmark’s Karlsruhe Institute for Technology has broken the data transmission rate record, achieving a rate of 43 terabits per second using just one laser and one fiber cable, noting that increasing transmission rates for digital data is becoming increasingly important as the Internet continues to grow at a stunning pace. The team used a new type of fiber cable developed by Japanese telecom giant NTT—instead of a single glass core, the new cable has seven.
Data is sent over the fiber from a single laser, which means the signal must be split prior to transmission and then reassembled once received. Sending 43 terabits of data in one second is the equivalent of backing up the contents of five full 1 TB hard drives in just a second. It’s likely to be a while before such fast transfer rates make it to the Internet backbone, much less our individual devices.
Read more at Phys.org.
In today’s Internet marketplace, good content is not enough
For awhile now, we’ve basically used the Internet to download content, though in recent years, the Internet became a channel through which we watch content live. In this increasingly interactive and collaborative environment, in which a matter of seconds may make the difference for consumers in choosing a brand, product or service, the time it takes to load content directly affects business results. But good content isn’t enough; it has to be delivered fast, effectively and with quality.
The challenge to effectively reach millions of online viewers will require delivering content through the Internet using top notch platforms, technology and optimization techniques. A modern CDN is made up of a large number of servers strategically distributed and interconnected around the world, which locally store and replicate temporary copies of content to the ones most visited or to those with the largest audience, drastically reducing the response time and improving the user experience, making your business posibilities virtually infinite.
Read the full article at Level3 blog.
Apple’s CDN Now Live: Has Paid Deals With ISPs, Massive Capacity In Place
Apple’s CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers. Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks. Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100 million in their CDN build out. Akamai is projected to see the most of the negative impact over time, given that almost 10% of their revenue comes from Apple.
Apple has been working on their new CDN network for about 12 months. Apple already controls the hardware, the OS (iOS/OS X) as well as the iTunes/App store platforms. Curently, they control the entire customer experience, with the exception being the way the content is delivered, but that’s about to change. Apple doesn’t own the last mile, but they’re paying to connect directly to it, and they’re just getting started.
Check the full report at StreamingMedia.
Is responsive design killing mobile?
Behavior changes based on the enviroment. Factors such as physical location, outcomes and trands can be different based on your device. Responsive design allows the layout, scale and orientation of the desktop site to be adapted to a mobile viewing experience. The content served up to the user is the same as on a desktop site, and while they layout is organized to accommodate a smaller screen. Any changes on the desktop site will ultimately change the performance on the mobile version of the site. A mobile website is separate and distinct site from the desktop site, and must be maintained as such.
For example, Lufthansa Airlanes launched it’s mobile site in 2007 and ensures the needs of it’s 140 000 daily visitors on-the-go. Someone accessing the site via mobile is more likely to have already purchased a ticket and is primarily interested in checking in or viewing their flight status, while when you acces the site from your desktop, the first thing you see is the option to search and book a new flight, followed by promotional offers. You can find similar examples in both weather and retail. In summary, there’s no point at choosing which is better, mobile or responsive. Mobile adoption clearly depends on meeting customer’s needs. If these needs are not met, we might undermine the true potential of mobile and ruin the experience for marketers and customers alike.
There’s only the cognition when people go mobile and when they’re browsing from their desktops and the psichology behind it, that can and should be used to maximize the user experience.
Full article at VentureBeat.
