Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Slim and trim to slow and bloated – the top 100 ecommerce websites

ecommerceCan you imagine, that among the top 100 ecommerce websites in the world, there’s one site that is over 2.5 MB in total size, and another that takes almost 7 seconds to load?

It’s not all bad news though in our brand new study of the performance of the leading ecommerce sites. We ran the top 100 sites through a set of grueling tests to find out which sites are really fast, which are really big, which ones load a lot of files, and much more.

Some sites are slim and trim, others are slow and bloated. Read on to found out which is which.

The biggest site weighs in at almost 2.6 MB

We used Pingdom’s free Full Page Test to analyze each site’s performance by taking the average result from three tests performed in early June. You can read more about the tests at the end of this article. To make it easier for you to see the main results of this study, each chart below shows only the top 10 and bottom 10 sites in each category. For each one, there’s a link below the chart to the full view with all the 100 sites.

When studying how big the sites are in terms of total size of all the files that need to be downloaded, the spread is quite amazing. As you can see below, the smallest site, iHerb.com, is about 5% of the total size of the biggest one, ticketmaster.com. And at 2.5 MB total size, ticketmaster.com is not that much bigger than the next three sites.

Ecommerce: total size

You can download a high-resolution version of this chart with the complete top 100 here.

On the other end of the chart, the second smallest site is adpost.com. Then follows wiley.com and cduniverse.com. What becomes quite clear if you look at the smallest sites in terms of the total size of files loaded is that they are rather sparse when it comes to graphics.

In the case of iherb.com, it’s also the site that loads in the fewest number of files, as you will see later, but let’s not get ahead of our selves.

What is interesting to note is that the average size of the top 100 sites is just under 1 MB, which is below the average of the web, which is currently around 1.1 MB.

Average load time is 2.3 seconds

When we look at the speed of the top 100 sites we see a similar spread to what we encountered with regards to the size. The average site loads in 2,316 milliseconds, with the fastest one (cambridge.org) at 539 ms.

Ecommerce: load time

You can download a high-resolution version of this chart with the complete top 100 here.

Here we find a site that really sticks out, and not in a good way. Futurebazaar.com takes up last position in the speed ranking, loading in almost 7 seconds. That’s about 1.6 seconds slower than the number two site, which is trademe.co.nz. However, futurebazaar.com is pretty average when it comes to size, only 1.2 MB, and it makes 101 requests, which is also fairly good in comparison.

Sites on average load 110 files

Finally, we looked at how many objects or files were loaded for each site. Generally speaking, the lower the number of requests made for different files, the faster a site can run. And that seems to be the case with iherb.com, which only loads 25 files.

Ecommerce: requests

You can download a high-resolution version of this chart with the complete top 100 here.

Compare iherb.com’s 25 files with barnesandnoble.com, the site which loads in the most files (249) out of the top 100 sites. You can of course also compare the total file size of the sites, with iherb.com’s 124 kB against barnesandnobles.com’s almost 1.8 MB.

Still room to optimize for performance

No doubt, web performance is a complex issue, and this study looks at just three variables, each which is relatively easy to isolate and measure. But if we can learn one thing from this study, it is that even if you run one of the top ecommerce sites in the world, there’s still a lot of room for improving the performance of the site.

We certainly plan to come back to this issue in the future to see how these sites, and others, develop in terms of performance.

If you’re interested in this topic, you may also want to check out our series of interviews about web performance.

About the data: The top 100 ecommerce web sites come from Alexa, and all the performance data was collected with Pingdom’s Free Full Page Test. We ran the test three times between June 11 and 14, 2012, all from our datacenter in Sweden, and we used the average of the three tests in this report. In some cases, where the main page of a site is really only a landing page where the user can click on to the real site, like ikea.com, we tested the full site, for example ikea.com/us/en. Where possible, we chose the US location of the site.

Image credit: Top image via Shutterstock.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free