E-commerce Optimization: Using Load Balancing and CDN to Improve Website Performance and Customer Satisfaction

Editor's Notes

1. We wanted to see how shoppers and website operators do and do not see eye to eye when it comes to an online shopping experience. To do this we performed a survey of online consumer and shoppers to understand online shopping behaviors including purchase habits on cross-platform devices, how shoppers judge whether a website has good or poor performance, and what drives shoppers to return to a website to shop again.
2. 67% of users will leave and not return to your site if it performs poorly 52% of all small business in the U.S now engaging in e-commerce Performance and User Experience critical for conversions and bottom line Content Delivery and Load Balancing improve performance – leading to more conversions and more transactions
3. No one likes slow websites. In fact, our research has shown a very real correlation between website loading times and page abandonment. After about 4 seconds of waiting, around 25% of visitors will leave. Another study has pointed out that a 1 second delay in page load results in 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. http://www.tagman.com/mdp-blog/2012/03/just-one-second-delay-in-page-load-can-cause-7-loss-in-customer-conversions/
4. With nearly half of all ecommerce transactions taking place on mobile devices, Ecommerce vendors also need to ensure that their sites are mobile friendly, as this percentage is growing, and looks to continue to grow.
5. Cross-Platform Optimization is Crucial to Business But our survey shows that vendors rank mobile compatibility as their last concern.
6. Online shoppers’ #1 priority is to quickly navigate and shop 46% abandon cart if it doesn’t load in under 5 seconds Transaction time improvements yielded 36% higher conversions
7. Downtime costs businesses money. A recent study by Ponemon Institute has found that every minute of unplanned outage is likely to exceed $8,000. If it’s this costly to have downtime, it is important to minimize outages by keeping them available, and also bring them back online as fast as possible. For this reason companies typically have some sort of Disaster recovery plan. Another study, this time by the Aberdeen group, compared businesses who use homegrown DR solutions, versus those who use 3rd party DR services and found that companies who us DR as a service typically have 50% fewer outages and recover from them 3 times faster.
8. Cloud-based load balancing and content delivery work together to speed up site from both ends - from server to cloud, and cloud to user 53% of website operators relatively unfamiliar with CDN 43% unfamiliar with Load Balancing
9. a content delivery network (CDN) is a network of datacenters than can cache, optimize, and serve content from the servers in closest physical proximity to website visitors. It avoids bottlenecks near the hosting server by allowing visitors to access a cached copy of the data nearest to them, instead of all visitors simultaneously accessing the same central server. Since most of the loading time of a website involves waiting for the content to download, using a CDN can significantly reduce load times by serving cached content from the server nearest to your visitor. Furthermore, by reducing the amount of data requests that your origin server has to serve, your server’s workload is greatly reduced. Overall, this significantly improves the performance of your website, giving your visitors a very fast experience. On average, websites using the Incapsula CDN are 50% faster andconsume up to 70% less bandwidth
10. As the Internet is getting faster, transport (downloading files, images, etc.) is no longer the most significant part of page load time. These days HTML file creation takes most of the page load time. Application servers are required to create an HTML file per client request and are usually required to issue multiple DB requests in the process, which obviously also has a significant impact on server load. The example shows the Incapsula website home page being served from a standard CDN that does not have HTML caching capabilities. It is clearly evident that HTML file creation takes most of the page load time, and of course, also most of the server load. Although the application server is required to create a new HTML file with each request, most of these HTML files are actually static, i.e. the exact same file is served to each and every user in any given time. Such files can easily be cached to significantly reduce page load time and server load, but most CDNs regard them as dynamic and will not cache them. Incapsula leveraged its security algorithms to develop application aware algorithms that can distinguish static HTML files (do not change over time or per user) from dynamic ones. These algorithms enables Incapsula to cache static HTML files, therefore significantly reducing page load time and server load.
11. High-res images, product videos, animations etc Mobile connections generally slower, smaller screens not amenable to elaborate web design
12. The incapsula solution includes several technologies which help optimize websites. The first is Content Caching. Out of the box, Incapsula automatically identifies content which is cacheable and determines the length of time that resource can be cached; more static assets will be cached longer than dynamic assets. This algorithm allows website owners to easily optimize their website without the need for a specialized staff who is experienced with caching techniques. For power users, we also provide tools to allow them to dive deep into the product and define custom settings for their caching. In addition to this, Cached content is optimized using compression, and minification in order to speed up delivery by reducing the amount of data needing to be sent to the user. Finally, Incapsula also includes networking optimization and smart session handling. All of these things come together to help our customers optimize their website, resulting in faster loading webpages, less bandwidth consumption, and lower web server utilization.
13. The Incapsula solution includes several technologies which further help optimize websites. The first is the caching rules engine that allows users to have full control over which resources will be cached (and for how long) and which resources will never be cached. The second is Instant Purging, which allows users to clear the Incapsula cache within seconds when new content is published. Users can choose to clear all the cache or only clear the specific resources that have been updated. In addition to this, Cached content is optimized using compression, and minification in order to speed up delivery by reducing the amount of data needing to be sent to the user. Finally, Incapsula also includes networking optimization and smart session handling allowing it to reuse existing connections and sessions, thus lowering overhead actions and reducing page load time. All of these things come together to help our customers optimize their website, resulting in faster loading webpages, less bandwidth consumption, and lower web server utilization.
14. Load balancing is a general term for various distribution techniques that help spread traffic and workload across different servers within a network. Put in human terms, the idea is simple: the more available hands working, the faster and more efficiently the job gets done, and the less work each person has to do. When applied to the computer networks, these principles of “community labor” become extremely valuable, as they help increase overall computing efficiency - minimizing downtime and raising overall throughput and performance.
15. *http://blogs.forrester.com/andy_hoar/15-04-02-us_b2b_ecommerce_to_reach_11_trillion_by_2020
16. What to learn more about Incapsula, or the latest in DDoS trends? Feel free to visit us at www.incapsula.com to download a free copy of our report, or to start a free 14 day trial of the product.