• by Joshua Bixby , December 17, 2010

The 2010 holiday season is being touted as the shopping season that put mobile on the map, but there's still a long way to go. According to industry benchmarks, mobile sites are slower, not faster, than they were last year. Online retailers may be reporting record m-commerce sales, but this is a questionable victory. There's every reason to believe these numbers would be much greater if mobile sites were faster.

Are mobile sites getting slower instead of faster?

Fifty-eight percent of mobile users expect sites to load at least as quickly on their mobile devices as on their desktops. You would think this expectation would lead to increasingly faster m-commerce sites, but the opposite seems to be the case.

According to industry benchmarks from Gomez and Keynote, mobile sites seem to be getting slower, not faster. Currently, the average m-commerce site loads in 5.47 seconds. A year ago, that number was 4.73 seconds. 

There are a few potential culprits here, such as oversized graphics and poorly optimized widgets, but pointing fingers doesn't fix the problem. Site visitors want a fast online experience, not excuses.

The psychology of mobile users: Hunters versus browsers

It's easy to understand why a fast online experience matters to mobile users. People using their mobile devices are usually on the move, whether they're shopping, ordering event tickets, or trying to find a restaurant. They're in "hunter" mode: they know exactly what they're looking for, and they're much more likely to become impatient with a site that doesn't immediately deliver.

You also have to consider the aesthetics of the average mobile experience. Simply put: compared to using a desktop, it's not pleasurable. You have tiny fonts, plus images so small as to be meaningless, and they're all squashed into poorly optimized pages that don't even fit in your screen. Being forced to endure a long wait time just to be served this kind of site is like adding insult to injury.

Is it any wonder that despite the holiday success of top-tier sites such as Amazon and eBay, most companies are still struggling to see any ROI from their mobile sites?

Only 5% of companies see ROI from their mobile sites

This is because most companies don't even have a unique mobile presence, and of those that do, many aren't measuring success.

In July of this year, a staggering 88% of companies surveyed were still serving their desktop sites across all platforms. This is a huge factor in why mobile performance is so poor.

The good news is that of the 12% of companies that do have a mobile strategy in place, almost half report seeing positive ROI.

The bad news is that of that same 12% of companies, about a third have not even measured their ROI, largely because they don't have a strategy for measuring the effectiveness of their site.

So how do you measure the relationship between mobile performance and mobile success?

The easiest way to make mobile development a priority is to identify a clear connection between performance and key performance indicators such as conversion and revenue. This is something that the e-commerce community needs to address -- and quickly. It took almost 10 years for e-commerce to generate meaningful data around regular Web performance. We don't have that luxury with the mobile Web.

Right now, there is very little hard data, but we're starting to see some numbers trickling in. In one example, this past year a leading online auto parts retailer conducted an A/B test of its mobile site, accelerating half of its traffic and leaving the other half unaccelerated. It appeared that speeding up the site by 40% caused the average order size to increase by 3% and conversions to increase by 5%. The site conducted another A/B test, during which it slowed down the performance of its mobile site. It found that when the site loaded in 7 seconds, the conversion rate suffered a 20% hit.

Tips for giving your visitors a fast mobile experience

When the dust settles after this holiday shopping season is over, the smart companies will regroup and take what they've learned to retool their mobile sites. Here are some of the tips they should be considering:

• Survey after survey of mobile consumers comes back with the same result: speed is more important than elaborate features. Keep your mobile site design simple and clean. Identify the most important features -- such as store locator, price comparison engine, coupons -- that your mobile customers care about and make those features most prominent.

• When consumers buy, the best experience is a one-click checkout. Multi-page checkouts are simply too onerous on small devices.

• Keep text and image files as small and functional as possible. Omit any page elements that serve no clear purpose.

• Multiple Web server connections can cause major slowdowns. Use as few hosts as possible to keep the number of Web connections to a minimum.