According to a recent consumer survey, 60 percent of mobile users will grow frustrated and abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load on their devices. Seventy-four percent will wait no more than five seconds, and when encountering a poorly performing site, a third of mobile consumers will go to a competitor's site instead.  

 

This impact of poor mobile site performance (speed and availability) can be enormous, and yet mobile web performance for many of the top retailers does not meet consumer expectations.

 

According to Compuware's most recent mobile retail site performance benchmark, which ranks the top 14 mobile sites according to speed and availability averaged out across four major mobile platforms, only one mobile site — QVC — delivered a page load time under three seconds in August. Only four (including QVC) of the 14 retailers measured on the mobile benchmark delivered page load times of five seconds or less.

 

What strategies can retailers adopt to ensure stronger mobile site performance throughout the upcoming holiday season and beyond?

 

Commit to right-sizing. One rule of thumb for mobile-optimized sites is to "keep it light" by reducing unnecessary heavy content, thereby maintaining or enhancing speed. But don't go so far as to take away too much content and leave your mobile site barebones, which may drive mobile users away.

 

The key is to tailor content based on what your mobile users expect and want on- the-go, both in terms of functionality and design. If your main website features 50 or more sections and features, your mobile customers may only use three of these, or they may be navigating store aisles and perusing the web with just their thumb. You need to identify key user scenarios and streamline the experience through those, keeping the content that helps monetize your site and scrapping the content that doesn't.

 

Manage Third Parties. Like the PC web, mobile sites in retail are growing increasingly complex, featuring a variety of third-party services and plug-ins including shopping carts, store locators with Google Maps as well as integration with social networks, all designed to enable a richer mobile experience. Research shows that the average website today calls out to eight different content-delivering domains in order for a user to complete a typical transaction, such as making a plane reservation, buying a television or downloading an iPhone app.

 

If you're calling out to a third-party component and it slows down, your whole mobile site is apt to slow down. But you don't have to be held hostage to third-parties — instead, you must proactively measure and optimize their performance, which comes from understanding the true user perspective.

 

Measure Performance from the True User Perspective. Whatever your mobile users are doing on your mobile site, is it easy to use? Is it satisfying? Are they enjoying the experience? Beyond third-parties, there's an even wider range of elements throughout the wireless ecosystem that can impact the user experience including content delivery networks, ISPs, carriers, mobile devices and browsers. 

 

Real mobile user monitoring helps you proactively manage all of these elements by starting with a true view into the mobile user experience in various regions, across different devices and under different traffic loads. Armed with this view, you can see which users may be experiencing a performance degradation and proactively identify and fix any offending elements, ideally before users are even aware of any performance issues.

 

With the explosive growth in the mobile web, and users expected to leverage their mobile devices even more this holiday shopping season, the need for fast and reliable mobile sites is more important than ever. Retailers need to place mobile site performance squarely at the top of their priority list, leveraging the same skills and techniques they’ve used to ensure high performance for their PC websites.