Not a lot of time today, but here are some quick notes on improvements Smith & Wesson could make to their new Web site.
Page Loading Time
- Put your pages on a diet. According to webpagetest.org your home page takes 32 seconds to load. That’s insane. The two sites I manage load in less than 4 and 6 seconds, respectively. Those pages are graphics rich, dynamically generated from SQL databases, and include JavaScript. You can do much better.
- Your home pages includes144 objects (HTML, JavaScripts, images, etc.). That’s also insane. Besides the sheer mass of content that has to be downloaded, the number of objects has a major effect on download time. Every object requires HTTP request overhead that kills download time. Cut the number of objects to the essentials. Then reduce the number of object requests by combining CSS files, combining JavaScript files, and using imagemaps and CSS sprites.
- Your JavaScript files need to be compressed by the Web server. The savings would be enormous. According to Websiteoptimization.com the largest of your 11 Javascript files, dojo.js, is 332 Kilobytes. It takes 2.5 seconds to download that one file. Server-side compression could reduce the download size to 90 Kilobytes.
- You could radically improve download speed by moving half of the objects off of smith-wesson.com to a secondary domain. That overcomes the browser’s per-domain connection limit, allowing it to download twice as many files at once. This one change could cut download time by a fourth without any other changes.
- The best place for the secondary domain is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Amazon’s Cloudfront. Amazon’s servers are likely faster and better-connected than yours, and Amazon provides images to overseas users via local-to-them edge servers.
- You should enable browser caching of static images to reduce repeat requests for graphics that haven’t changed between pages.
- Most images are missing width and height attributes.
Usability and Modernization
- On the social media front you need a blog and RSS feed for news. (If you have an RSS feed I didn’t see it and it isn’t listed in the header, so modern browsers can’t discover it automatically.) You’re on Facebook and Twitter, but I missed that at first because the icons aren’t prominent.
- You need a robots.txt file, as well as a sitemap.xml file for better search engine indexing.
- The site needs more winnowing and filtering tools. For instance within the handgun categories users should be able to filter on caliber, frame material, etc.
- When a user changes their choices – on the number of items shown per page, for instance – that choice should be saved to a cookie so they don’t have to re-select it.
- The old site had a feature to show new products. I’m not seeing it here. Without it I almost missed the 627 with a 2 and 1/3″ barrel that’s pretty close to the “Blood Works” 627.
Previously – S&W’s New Web Site Still Needs Better Photo Editing
RSS Posts Feed
Excellent in-depth analysis, and I’ve nothing to add on the image editing or loading time issues. I just did a clean load of the page and it took about 11 seconds to fully load.
While you’re pointing out things they might improve, the background (at least on the main page) is poorly chosen, it has a lot of graphic anomaly while scrolling.
At least now it’s possible to link directly to one of their products. Springfield needs to learn that lesson.
My tips to them:
- Go easy on that humongous pop-up menu in the middle of the page. It’s really annoying when I’m trying to read something, and accidentally mouse-over it and can’t see anything anymore. And why did you make the pictures in the menu behave like links if they aren’t links? And why not have them be links when there’s only one item below the picture?
- Don’t put more thumbnail links than the product has thumbnails. For instance, on the Model 63, there’s an extra blank thumbnail that’s clickable and shows a blank square, which is also clickable for an expanded view of the blank square.
- When someone was on Page 2 or 3 of a multi-page category and clicked on a product for a better look and then clicks “Back” to return to the category, your navigation should return them to the Page 2 or 3 they were on, not back to Page 1.
- And generally, they need to fix info around the site. Like in the semi-auto .22 handguns, the numbers on the 22A do not match up with the descriptions. A4 should be the tool-less takedown, A3 is just the back of the grip, and should be moved to the front of the grip where the ambi-mag release is.
- Oh yeah, and the Recently Viewed items apparently doesn’t work. After browsing a bit, I clicked on the Model 63, and it took me to a basically blank page titled Model 63, with broken breadcrumb navigation.
.-= Mike´s last blog ..Policing for Profit – The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture =-.