Analyzing the Walmart site performance | Hacker News Reader

Analyzing the Walmart site performance

iamakulov.com

96 pointsrammy123429 comments

I joined the Edge Foundation team @WalmartLabs about a year ago. We help manage the HTTP ingress flow (CDNs, WAF, Tier 1/2 proxies and LBs, etc) for all Walmart eCommerce properties. Our custom proxy also does some basic and not so basic frontend optimizations (js and css compression/minification/bundling, image resizing, url rewrites, etc) and handles a large portion of routing requests to backend servers.

This is a great write up from earlier this year, and from the screenshots it looks like it was before our new site design launched. That was a pretty massive modernization effort that included some site performance improvements. We also now have a sizeable team (100+) focused on some of the other details from the article. Brotli for instance went into A/B testing this month.

There are a lot of moving parts and changing priorities at a company the size of Walmart, and development and deployments can be slower than at smaller shops. But there definitely is active progress on improving our site speed.

And if you like working on any of these kinds of systems we are always hiring!

Glad to hear it. I find Walmart's web site to be so slow on my PC to be almost unusable. I hate to think what the experience must be like for users on old computers or really low end phones.

I think http://www.foundem.co.uk/ is a good example of how lightweight and fast an ecommerce site can be.

And I bet it was made by just one guy in a few weeks too.

It has a very mid 00s feel to it, I wonder how old the codebase is.

Click on hotels and you get this: http://www.foundem.co.uk/hygiene/Temporary_Announcement_2016...

On older PC, dsl (rural), Windows 10, and latest Chrome. It is more than acceptable for me because it works. Lots of cute websites don't because of broken JavaScript or slow library downloads.

Hey, I’m the author or the article. Kudos for the great work, really like the new site!

What is particularly striking about this article is that Walmart was - in 2002 - publishing influential studies about the correlation between site speed and conversion rate:

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slid...

Get back to the basics guys!

That or they found out it didn't matter if you are Walmart.

I imagine the conversation went like this:

Dev: faster page loads make us more money!

PM: we NEED to use this custom font. This is non-negotiable.

I work for Walmart Labs. While your comment is funny, I just came here to say that this is not really how Walmart works.

The technology division of Walmart known as Walmart Labs that is responsible for developing and maintaining the website along with all backend infrastructure performs A/B testing for every new feature (including custom font) that is introduced. Any change to production systems or applications goes through a rigorous review process which involves only engineers (not managers).

No PM in Walmart can define a non-negotiable feature like this. Walmart Labs has a strong engineering culture and feature definition and testing is largely driven by engineers. Overriding a developer's recommendation the way you describe would be found to be in very poor taste.

The report in this article was created prior to the current redesign of the Walmart website. Back then a lot of technical debt had accumulated. The website has been redesigned now and a lot of that technical debt has been eliminated. The website is much faster now. Please give it a try.

You had me with this: "Any change to production systems or applications goes through a rigorous review process which involves only engineers (not managers)."

I'm going to spend some time looking around the site today.

Some good points, but I would suggest using "font-display: swap;" instead of "font-display: optional;" This will avoid the problems outlined and will actually replace the fallback font with the custom one without having to reload the page.

I think that's addressed in the article, optional is used to avoid a visual "pop-in" effect.

On the Walmart site, >>if they have it<<, it’s faster.

1. No dead ends from distractions or on purpose. Amazon usually forces you to screens you didn’t want to see. 2. Checkout is faster or just as fast.

And if it’s wrong, it easy to return the same day for credit.

Wouldn't it be better to show the intended font at first page (using font-display: swap or fallback instead of optional) instead of a potentially uglier fallback font until second page?

With swap (or fallback) the page is visible early using a fallback font but you still end up with your "goal font" without having to reload or visit another page

These claims don't make sense together:

> Walmart is one of the top USA e-commerce retailers. In 2016, they were the second after Amazon by sales.

> In e-commerce, the conversion is directly affected by how fast the site loads.

Maybe site performance matters a whole lot less than developers think it does. At least at this scale. Is the claim that users get tired of waiting and head over to Amazon? Seems like there would be a lot of other factors in a decision like, most of which would be far more important than load time.

Or do they get tired of waiting and just decide not to purchase something? Do they end up just purchasing it later? If they don't, then I guess people didn't need whatever they were trying to buy in the first place? If that's the case, maybe slow page load times are a good thing for society as a whole. Perhaps we should be celebrating them as a check on empty materialistic impulse buying.

FWIW Personally I prefer Walmart's site. I find it easier to use, I like that I can sort by best sellers, and there seems to be less advertising noise in the results. However it has a high minimum to get free shipping, a smaller selection of goods, and some things seem to be more expensive.

But overall I was surprised by how good it turned out to be - give it a whirl if you've never tried it. Amazon is ahead of the curve, but I'm starting to wonder if they'll manage to hold onto that lead. A few missteps and things could look completely different in a decade.

Those claims can both be true; perhaps if Walmart's site loaded faster, they would have even more sales, even if they already have a lot.

I don't think it's as simple as "user closes the window after 1.87 seconds thus you lose a sale". I don't even think most people can move that fast. But if one site is regularly faster then it's less frustrating and you'll use it more often. That's true of commerce sites, text editors, IDEs, etc. Unless the faster one is frustrating in other ways.

to be fair, all the top eCommerce sites are terribly slow EXCEPT for Amazon.

- bestbuy.com

- homedepot.com

- wayfair.com

- target.com

- nike.com

- hm.com

Some airline sites that do billions in revenue are so slow that they need Ajax spinners when you shop. Ugh.

Airline reservations systems are kind of fascinating, because they were some of the first really complex computer systems, and a lot of those crusty old bits are still chugging along fifty odd years later, with newer and newer piles of code layered on top like a demented tower of jenga.

http://thecodist.com/article/how_flight_reservations_work_pa...

http://thecodist.com/article/how_much_is_that_seat_by_the_wi...

There are ones with no TPF at the bottom now. And most res systems have no old tech in the shopping part... that's more often in the booking, change/cancel and check-in flows.

The customer expectations are much lower when shopping for a plane ticket. A painfully long experience is actually expected.

Friction is absent when buying anything from Amazon (because of webperf, UX, etc) so customer expectations standard is way higher. If something goes wrong on Target, Mediamarkt or Carrefour website, the sale is gone and off the customer goes to Amazon.

As a similar example, in France the main way to buy a train ticket was through the railway website, whose UX was poor (as were travel agencies). A small team went at it and built a competing booking website (Captaine Train) whose sole promise was a quick and easy to book a train ticket. They instantly removed the above mentioned friction and became a huge competitor almost overnight.

-amazon is terribly slow as well. Dhgate and the ali sites are faster on my phone than amazon.

Amazon is very slow to me. It takes several clicks and loads to get the product images to zoom

AliExpress.com is the fastest e-commerce site I have experienced. It was very apparent when I first browsed it - I wasn't even looking for speed, it simply jumped out at me. Especially the search.

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