After a tremendous year of growth for mobile commerce, Keynote Systems (News 
- Alert) called out mobile websites best and worst practices from 2011. For over a decade, Keynote has been the Internet’s performance authority. Keynote uses the world’s largest Internet test and measurement network and one of the most representative panels of Internet users to deliver data and insights on the end-users experience.
Keynote’s research provides an in-depth understanding of certain markets for customers and competitors. As the mobile industry has continued to grow and make an increasing impact in commerce, businesses are learning that they need to begin to make considerations regarding their mobile customers and the mobile purchasing experience.
For the last 12 months, Keynote Systems have continued to analyze mobile performance and listed out some trends they found during the past year.
Keynote said the lighter a site is regarding content, the better. “It was clear that keeping a mobile site on the light site was the way to get top speed and performance on Keynote’s Mobile Performance Index,” said Keynote. Most of the websites that remained at the top of the performance lists home pages were limited with their content and user-friendly.
Keynote made recommendations such as; using a program called, ‘Sprite,’ which condenses the amount of server requests made for images, allowing your site to partner with Usablenet, which handles sites JavaScripts and Cascading Style Sheets through its cloud mobile platform, and improving the time a site takes to load. All of these tools made sites like Dell, Walgreens, Best Buy (News - Alert), and Foot Locker at the top of the performance list this year.
However, Keynote also found some problems that kept sites from flourishing this year. Keynote said that mobile load testing is critical to the success of website’s performance and to revenue in busy shopping seasons. Herman Ng, mobile performance evangelist at Keynote Systems said, a website needs to be informative.
“When conducting maintenance, retailers should always provide a ‘Site under maintenance’ message to inform end users when to expect service to resume,” said Ng.
Ng said this information would most likely make a customer return rather than just find another site and shop somewhere else.
Edited by
Jennifer Russell
