Web performance best practices of the top 50 shopping websites

The Constellix research team has released a new study that explores the web performance best practices of the top 50 shopping websites.

Constellix monitored the web performance of the top 50 shopping websites according to Alexa, a web analytics provider. Researchers used the Constellix Sonar Lite Chrome extension to monitor page load times. The Chrome developer tools were also used to collect page size and the number of requests on each website’s homepage.

“Our research team found a strong correlation between the number of requests to third-party services and increased load times. Each request requires a DNS lookup, which can significantly affect load times if good hosting practices aren’t followed,” says President of Constellix Steven Job.

Tests were run multiple times over a weeklong period to account for service disruptions. Follow up research was conducted using the Constellix Sonar RUM tool to detect service impacting issues and upstream provider latency.The study found that the top performing websites (lowest average page load times) had few requests and small file sizes. Better performance was attributed to good hosting practices. Almost all of the top websites used CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) and outsourced their DNS hosting to a specialized provider. Constellix researchers released a second report highlighting the bad practices of the bottom ten websites. The slowest website took nearly six times longer to load as the fastest website, and the file size and number of requests were well over the average. During testing a number of websites were slowed by upstream provider issues. Researchers used Constellix Sonar RUM to detect the disruption and found that a CDN service was experiencing an outage, which caused requests to be extremely long. A single request could slow a web page by nearly two seconds.For the full study check out these blogs: Web Performance Do's and Don'ts from the Top Shopping Websites Part 1&Part 2

‍About Constellix

‍Constellix is a subsidiary of Tiggee, the creators of DNS Made Easy, and the industry leader in providing IP Anycast enterprise DNS services. Constellix is an Internet Traffic Optimization (ITO) company and trailblazer in next-generation traffic management solutions. The Constellix GeoDNS platform offers the most powerful and precise DNS query management, engineered for the cloud. The platform is fully integrated with Constellix Sonar, which offers a range of advanced monitoring features and intelligent analytics tools.