Leading web sites take a holistic approach
Taking a holistic view of a web site’s performance is a hallmark of leading online retailers, says Carol Carpenter, senior director of marketing for Keynote System. “It’s taking the end-to-end view,” she says.
Carpenter spoke yesterday at the First Annual Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago.
Leading web sites know that each portion of the infrastructure and application of a site affect the users’ experiences, Carpenter says. They start by judging performance from the users’ perspective, add layers of technology that affect that performance, understand how each piece of the infrastructure and application work together to deliver the user experience, and build good communication between the business teams and IT to ensure a positive user experience in the context of business goals, she says.
Leading online retail sites—Office Depot, JC Penney and Eddie Bauer—also have consistent transaction speed and continuously improve their sites, Carpenter says. Their home pages load in less than 1.5 seconds, perform login/authentication in less than 2 seconds and execute complex back-end queries in less than 3 seconds.
The leading sites also report better than 99.5% availability during peak periods, indicating a good capacity planning process, and they very infrequently report 100% downtime during an hour, Carpenter says. “If your site isn’t close to 99% available, you need to work with your team,” she says.
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