Even though our world continues to creep ever closer to being paper-free—trading our paper tablets for iPads, office supply stores have had to reinvent the way they do business and what their focus is. Staples and OfficeDepotTh are two mega-chain retailers who’ve long been in the fight, regularly providing printing services, as well as day-to-day necessities for the workplace, like pens, calendars, computer accessories, and so much more. And with the all-in-one ecommerce solutions monopolizing the public’s needs (we’re looking at you, Amazon), the desire to shop at these niche market leaders—who typically charge more for the same products—is becoming less and less.

So, for our latest, Showdown, we looked at these two office supply bigwigs and used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from August 26 to September 16, 2018. After engaging in this different kind of “Office Olympics,” we were expecting the usual quiet response from two reliable websites (i.e. good performance), but instead found what was equivalent to, well, a fun office chair race gone horribly wrong.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both Staples and OfficeDepot’s sites seemed to perform satisfactorily, with neither site ever really seeing significant downtime, but one of them really seemed to struggle with its load time.

AlertBot ended up returning over 800 alerts from Staples.com in the evaluated time span, with half of them being slow files bogging down the page, and the other half being page load timeouts. This doesn’t necessarily mean the site crashes, just that it’s taking unusually long to load. Their site regularly had a pop-up window during this time period promoting signing up for their email list, which seemed to play a part in disrupting the site’s load time and process.  (Staples.com 5/10)

On the flip side, OfficeDepot.com performed much better (despite also having a pop-up on its page), but while it seemed to see problems less often, it did experience two failure events, experiencing 98% uptime (compared to Staples’ 100%). The majority of the errors OfficeDepot experienced were slow files or longer load times. Despite this, however, it seems as though its worst times were in the middle of the night (a frequent site maintenance time), which is common for most sites. (OfficeDepot.com 7/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring.

Staples.com’s speed tests proved that load times were a regular issue. Its best day, on average, was Monday, September 17^th with 7.9 seconds. It’s not the worst load time, but given that most sites are expected to load in 2 to 3 seconds these days, it’s almost three times that. Their best time of day was on Thursday, September 6 at 10am with 3.3 seconds. The worst day, on average, was Friday, September 7^th with 10.3 seconds, while the worst time of day was at 1am on Sunday, September 9^th with a sluggish 13.8 seconds.  (Staples.com 7/10)

OfficeDepot.com actually fared worse, comparatively. Their best day proved to be Thursday, September 6 with 9.9 seconds for the page to load. Their best time of day was at 6pm on Wednesday, September 5^th at 6.4 seconds. Their worst is significantly worse, with Monday, August 27^th seeing an average of 12.5 seconds, and the worst time of day being on the same day at 3am with 16.8 seconds! (OfficeDepot.com 6/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

Typically, for the geographic tests, California is king, always turning in the fastest response time. For Staples, it’s actually North Carolina, who saw an average of 3.7 seconds of page load time. Washington, DC was second at 4.7 seconds, and New York was third at 5.2 seconds. The state with the slowest results was Missouri with 15.1 seconds and New Jersey with 15 seconds. Oddly enough, California, Florida, Colorado and Virginia all averaged 15 seconds—which is unusual. (Staples.com 6.5/10)

Things were the norm for OfficeDepot, however. They saw their fastest speeds in California, at 7.5 seconds, with Virginia being second fastest at 7.7 seconds. Their slowest performance was Missouri with a crawl of 19.9 seconds, and Utah followed it up at 15.6 seconds. (OfficeDepot.com 6/10)

These aren’t the worst website load times we’ve seen, but they also weren’t anything to brag about either.

Usability

For evaluating a site’s usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to find an office executive chair and add it to our shopping cart.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.staples.com into our Chrome browser, it took 30 seconds and 5 clicks to search for “office executive chair,” click on one to view its product page, add it to the cart, and click “checkout.” (It had us thinking “That was easy!”)

For OfficeDepot.com, it took about 40 seconds and 6 clicks to get to the checkout process. OfficeDepot had a pop-up as soon as we got to the site which added one click, and then clicking on the cart and going to the checkout seemed to be a clunkier experience.

It’s a tough call for usability, but we did find the Staples checkout process to be a tad smoother.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(Staples.com 9/10)
(OfficeDepot.com 8/10)

Verdict

It’s surprising how closely these two office supply giants performed – and how disappointing each did as well.  Still, neither were so bad that they experienced many full-on website failures, but both could benefit from some serious attention paid to increasing their website speed. Neither site really stands out above the other with its performance, because the good and the bad often balanced each other out, but when it comes down to considering the sheer usability as a tie breaker, we feel the verdict is…

3 Reasons Why Website Speed is More Important than Ever

by Louis Kingston

Today’s business environment is relentlessly fast-paced. Today’s startups blast into tomorrow’s enterprises. And just as rapidly, today’s unicorns take a one-way journey into “hey, whatever happened to…” country. However, there’s another critical piece of the velocity puzzle that many businesses are missing, and it’s costing them customers and profits: the speed of their website.

Speed Kills Lives 

Nearly 50 years ago, the government introduced the phrase “speed kills” to warn drivers that going too fast from point A to point B could result in a detour to point C (the police station), point D (the hospital) or point E (the morgue). It was good advice then, and it’s still good advice now.

But when the scene shifts from the asphalt freeway to the information superhighway, speed doesn’t kill anything. On the contrary, it keeps websites alive as far as visitors are concerned. Here are the 3 reasons why:

1. Speed Makes Websites Sticky

The word “bouncy” has a happy and positive feel to it, while the word “sticky”…well, it doesn’t. Nobody shows up to a birthday party excited to jump around in the sticky castle, and swimming pool diving boards wouldn’t be doing their job if people stuck to them (although it would be kind of hilarious).

But when it comes to websites, sticky is glorious and bouncy is dreadful — and that’s where speed makes a massive difference. A study by Kissmetrics found that a one second delay in load time can send conversion rates plunging by seven percent! Think about that. Actually, don’t think about that. Just read this sentence. That took a whopping two (!) seconds.

2. Speed is SEO Rocket Fuel

An old joke in the SEO world goes like this: “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google.” (And in related news, an old conversation among psychologists is: “Why do SEO people make jokes about hiding dead bodies?”)

Macabre humor aside, the point is simple to understand: for most (if not all) of their keywords, businesses either need to be on page one of Google — and preferably in the top three positions — or they might as well be advertising in the Yellow Pages (ask your grandparents).

Once again, speed is a big part of the SEO story. Google — which is obsessively secretive about how its algorithm works (the first rule of Google Search Club is that you don’t talk about Google Search Club) —has actually gone ahead and formally confirmed that page speed is a significant SEO ranking factor for mobile and desktop searches.

The moral to this story? All else being equal, a website that loads faster will rank higher than a website that loads relatively slower. And in the long-run that could mean the difference between surviving or shutting down.

3. Speed Influences Perception

Einstein revealed that time, quite literally, is relative. But you don’t have to become a physicist or get yourself on a million memes to experience the deep truth of this in your bones. Here’s a fun little experiment:

Imagine that your favorite football team is losing a very important game. It’s late in the fourth quarter, and your beloved team is behind by six points. Although the clock is ticking down one second at a time, in your view the time is racing by. Surely, the clock must be rigged!

Now, imagine that your team is ahead vs. behind. The clock is still ticking down one second a time, but to you it’s not racing — it’s grinding slowly and painfully. Yet again: the clock must be rigged!

What this simple example demonstrates is what psychologists dub the perception of speed. Essentially, this means that our emotions influence how we grasp the velocity of passing time. Just a few seconds can seem like the “blink of an eye,” or a tedious wait — as we all know from toiling at the (not-so) express line in the grocery store.

The direct link to website speed here is unmistakable: visitors dislike waiting for websites to load. Actually, they hate it. Each extra second exponentially adds to their unhappiness, and makes it more likely that they’ll exact revenge by smacking the back button on their browser — never to return.

No, this doesn’t mean that websites must load instantaneously, like flipping channels on a TV. Technology isn’t there yet, and visitors aren’t unreasonable or unrealistic. But yes, it does mean that speed is connected UX, and ultimately, with brand: fast loading times creative a positive experience and emotions that are associated with the brand, while slow loading times do the opposite.

The Bottom Line

Website speed has always been important. But these days, it’s crucial — and in many cases, it’s THE MOST IMPORTANT factor. After all, it really doesn’t matter how amazing a website is and what it offers, if visitors never get there in the first place.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

If website performance is important to you, then you’ll know just how vital it is to the success of your business’s website. To AlertBot, web performance is everything. This topic is of great interest to us, as we live and breathe web performance on a daily basis. It got us thinking – we all love a good head-to-head, mano-a-mano rivalry: Tyson vs Holyfield. The Hatfields vs The McCoys. The Jets vs The Sharks. Prego vs Ragu. Luke vs Vader. So we thought, what if we tracked the performance of two websites within a certain genre and pit them against each other. Who has the better website performance? Who will come out on top?

Every Fall, Apple releases a new iPhone like clockwork. But Apple isn’t the only game in town. With Apple celebrating the recent release of the iPhone 7, Samsung has their Galaxy S7 (which released in March). So we decided it was fitting to have Apple.com go toe-to-toe with Samsung.com. The results were not unexpected. (Well… most of the results.)

When you have companies as serious about their products and innovation as these two, you’d expect their websites to perform impeccably. And, honestly, they did.

We tracked the sites and examined three weeks in September – the 1^st through the 22^nd – to see how these sites performed.  During this timeframe, we tested the websites around the clock from 17 different locations across the United States using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser Monitoring.  The tests were performed by loading their homepages inside real Firefox browsers and giving them a maximum of 7 seconds to render and become fully interactive.  Anything beyond 7 seconds (which is well above the average expected page load time) was considered a failure.  After compiling all the data, this is what we found:

Reliability

When we examine the reliability of a website, we’re looking for failure events – like when pages don’t fully load or go down completely – and try to identify the cause of the failure. Some common causes are slow third-party code used on pages, incomplete page content, actual web server failures, etc.

For Samsung, their website experienced no failure events during our test period, and achieved 100% uptime. This is definitely above the norm for website performance, but not unexpected for a company like Samsung.  We would have loved to find some juicy failure-generated data to talk about, but Samsung’s website was as clean as a whistle on this front. (Samsung Score 10/10)

Similarly, Apple.com experienced no failure events and achieved 100% uptime. While I’d expect nothing less from a juggernaut like Apple, it’s still impressive when you consider other retailers that experience frequent website issues. (Apple Score 10/10)

Speed

When we evaluate a website’s speed, we’re looking at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive.  We run these tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

While evaluating the speed of the websites specifically, Samsung.com’s fastest day was Friday, Sept. 2^nd, with its slowest day being Saturday, Sept. 3^rd. On average, the site’s homepage took  around 1.7 seconds to load. That’s not bad at all! Some recent studies have shown that the expected load time for sites in ecommerce to be 2 seconds or less, so Samsung definitely fits the bill here. Some online studies have determined that if an ecommerce site is making $100,000 per day in sales, just a 1-second page delay could potentially cost the company $2.5 million in lost sales per year.  (Ouch!) On its slowest day (Sept 3^rd), Samsung.com saw some load times in the range of over 7 seconds at times during the day.     (Samsung Score 9/10)

While evaluating Apple.com’s speed, its fastest day was also a Friday, on Sept. 9^th, with its slowest day being a Friday, Sept. 2 (coincidentally, the same day Samsung experienced its fastest load time), in which the site took 10 seconds to load at times (due to a slow page file error). However, on average, the site’s homepage took  around 1.3 seconds to load. It’s a hair faster than Samsung’s, but they’re close to each other.    (Apple Score 9/10)

One major mistake a lot of websites make is utilizing large graphic file sizes or third party code on their home page, and it’s things like that that can really bog down a website’s speed. It’s not surprising that both Apple and Samsung avoid this mistake. While both of them display large, beautiful images on their front page, they optimize their file sizes well.

Geographic

When we looked at Samsung.com’s performance at various locations around the United States, we found that the site consistently took longer to load in Texas, with its slowest time occurring in Washington, DC, but was the fastest in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. Samsung.com had just a handful of minor site hiccups during this three-week period, but only at specific locations. For example, AlertBot registered 5 instances of slower load times: once in New York, twice in Florida, once in Washington DC and once in Washington state. Still, it managed to perform more than adequately at these locations overall.  It wouldn’t be uncommon for websites to experience significant trouble in certain areas of the country on a regular basis, but we expect only the best from Samsung.   (Samsung Score 9/10)

When we looked at Apple.com’s website performance from various locations around the U.S, we found that the site consistently took the longest to load in Utah and Texas, but was the fastest in Florida and North Carolina. It’s intriguing to note that both Florida and North Carolina saw the best load times for both websites, while Texas was one of the slowest for both.  AlertBot did catch two instances of slower load times and a slow javascript file in Illinois, but neither problem caused the site to go completely down.   (Apple Score 9/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task that a typical user might want to perform on sites like these. Then, using hands-on testing, we perform the same task on each website while timing how long it takes to complete and how many mouse clicks it takes to get the job done.  This time, we decided to approach each site with the intention of purchasing their latest phone.  We timed how long it would take from the point of entering the URL into the browser on through to getting the phone into the online shopping cart.

From the point of typing in “Apple.com” and clicking through their site from the phone product pages all the way to the shopping cart, it took 45 seconds (and 7 clicks of the mouse) for us to add a SIM-free 256GB “jet black” iPhone 7 to the online “shopping bag.” (There’s an additional click, however, to view the cart when you’re done adding the phone to it.)

From typing “Samsung.com” into our browser and clicking through to add a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge 32GB “unlocked” phone into our shopping cart and viewing the virtual bag, it took a shocking 1 minute and 30 seconds (in 5 mouse clicks)! We used Google Chrome as our browser for both websites and the Samsung site froze up twice during the process (in fact, we accidentally added TWO of the same phone to our cart because we were trying to click through to the cart and it was unresponsive). Just to be fair, we tried it again, and it hung up yet again during the ordering process, but this time it was a little under a minute to get to the shopping bag. All of this happened on Chrome’s latest version, too. We know web browsers can be super fickle, though, so we decided to try it a third time, this time with Mozilla Firefox, and it took 20 seconds to get the same phone into the shopping cart. On Apple’s site, for the iPhone, there are a lot more choices – from storage space to phone color – to choose from, so it makes sense as to why that process might take longer. But it is rather alarming that Samsung’s site experienced THAT much trouble while just trying to add their phone to the shopping cart.

Just to compare via Firefox, then, we re-performed the timed test for Apple.com. One could argue that re-tests don’t account for newfound familiarity with either site, but it took 25 second to add the same iPhone 7 to the shopping cart. While that’s a few seconds slower than Samsung, we also didn’t experience any problems on either browser with Apple’s site.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(Samsung Score 7/10)          (Apple Score 9/10)

Final Verdict

The performance of both sites were very, very good and quite close to one another. Apple’s site just barely edged out Samsung’s on speed and geographic performance, while both matched each other on reliability. Despite their slight differences, they both performed at the top of their game in online performance. However, after factoring in our usability testing, where Apple’s site performed much more consistently, the winner for the very first AlertBot Showdown is clear:

WINNER: