How Does Network Latency Effect eCommerce Page Loads?
Your eCommerce site has a bottleneck to better performance.
What is the bottleneck?
Network latency.
The speed at which your website data is delivered to your shoppers is affecting your revenue.
You can have control over this metric, but for this to be of interest to you, we should probably explain how it works.
How network latency, which we discuss in milliseconds (ms), ultimately affects your website is our discussion for this post. To be as competitive as possible in the eCommerce space, knowing every area of improvement can provide the competitive advantage.
Customers, may very well leave your site for a competitor if the page load times are too slow. If you have done all the web development practices correctly, the inherent structure of the Internet could be costing you business.
This is why we are looking at how page load times are calculated, with network latency being the key factor.
We will look at three metrics, HTTP requests, browser downloads, and network latency, and how these can be used in a formula to calculate page load times.
Here is how we calculate your page load times:
How Many HTTP Requests?
The first metric to understand is how many HTTP requests the website requires to download. You can determine the number of HTTP requests your website needs by running a web page test here. This test will not only provide how many HTTP requests are required, but also the overall download speed of your site.
100 HTTP requests is an average number for a website, which is going to be the value we use for our formula below.
How Many Simultaneous Web Browser Downloads?
The next metric to establish is how many simultaneous requests a web browser can make. A typical browser will be able to make about 4 simultaneous requests at its default settings. This can fluctuate, but for the purposes of our example, this will be the value used.
What is our Network Latency?
The last item we need to understand is our network latency. This will ultimately affect our page load time in seconds. Acceptable network round trip time (RTT) is around 200 ms, but we would ideally like to see this number below 100 ms.
For our calculation below, it is important to note that the average eCommerce website load time is 8.56 seconds.
The Formula
Given these three metrics, we can determine our overall website latency. With overall latency, we can determine the page load time in seconds. The formula is as follows:
(HTTP requests/simultaneous browser requests) * network latency in ms = Page load time in ms
Or:
network latency in ms = Page load time in ms / (HTTP requests/simultaneous browser requests)
We have simplified this formula to provide a workable baseline for calculations.
The precise formula for determining these metrics, which includes bandwidth calculations, can be seen here.
Our formula with the values we chose above is:
(100/4)*200ms = 5,000 ms or 5 seconds
By utilizing this formula, you can determine how network latency is affecting your overall page load times. Varying the network latency value will allow you to see the significance this will have on the overall page load time in seconds.
When 100 ms is the equivalent of 1% in revenue, and 1 second in page speed is 2% in sales, we can see that making improvements in eCommerce sites has direct business implications.
Article originally published on the Datapath.io Blog.
