Web Performance Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The Web Performance Market is expected to register a CAGR of 8.72% over the forecast period from 2021 - 2026. In the present technological world, customers are expecting fast and reliable online user experiences from every website. If the user waits for the page to load, they'll most likely visit another website instead, as they have limited time to wait for the website to load. Website performance is incredibly essential because customers generally think load times are slower than they are. This means there is a raising need for various organizations to deploy web performance optimization solutions for the website load as fast as possible. If the business is run entirely on the web, performance is crucial, and if the site's user experience is fast and responsive to user input, it can only serve the business well.

Key Highlights

• Web performance plays a significant role in the success of any online venture. Here are some instances that show how high-performing sites retain and engage users better than low-performing ones. Pinterest reported an increased search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15% when they decreased perceived wait times by 40%. COOK, a provider of medical devices, increased conversions by 7%, reduced bounce rates, and increased pages per session by 10% when they decreased average page load time by 850 milliseconds. The BBC found they lost 10% of users for every second their website took to load. DoubleClick by Google reported that 53% of mobile site visits were exited if a page took longer than 3 seconds to loaded and also, it was found that sites loading within 5 seconds had 70% longer sessions, 25% higher ad viewability and 35% lower bounce rates than sites taking almost four times longer at 19 seconds.
• Retaining users is crucial to improving conversions. Slow websites have a negative impact on revenue, and the opposite is also true. Here are some instances of how performance has played a role in making businesses more or less profitable. For Mobify, a technology company, every 100ms delay in homepage load speed resulted in a 1.11% increase in session-based conversion, resulting in an average annual revenue increase of almost USD 380,000. Also, a 100ms decrease in checkout page load speed amounted to a 1.55% increase in session-based conversion, which resulted in an average annual revenue increase of nearly USD 530,000. DoubleClick reported that publishers whose sites loaded within five seconds earned up to twice as much ad revenue than site loading within 19 seconds.
• As mobile users continue to become a more substantial portion of internet users worldwide, it's essential to bear in mind that many of these users access the web through mobile 5G, LTE, 3G, and even 2G networks. The decreasing cost of prepaid data plans makes access to the internet more affordable in locations where it once wasn't. According to the Backlinko analysis of 5.2 million pages, the average desktop Time to First Byte (TTFB) speed is 1.286 seconds on desktop and 2.594 seconds on mobile. The average time it takes to load a web page entirely is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile, which translates that the average web page takes 87.84% longer to load on mobile vs. desktop. The deployment of web performance solutions could enhance the mobile user's experience of accessing websites of individual enterprises website.
• With the outbreak of COVID-19, technology departments across the globe are grappling with surging demand and mounting pressures to accelerate digital transformation strategies. According to a survey from AppDynamis, 81% of the technologists believe that managing spikes in website traffic is the biggest challenge in delivering seamless customer experiences during the pandemic, which could augment significant growth web performance solutions. A surge in traffic can increase IT costs, especially bandwidth and compute consumption, as they are often optimized for different ranges. Deployment of web performance solutions can reduce costs and serve most, if not all, of the static resources to reduce bandwidth and computation costs.

Key Market Trends

Retail is Expected to Hold Significant Share

• As retailers focus more and more on eCommerce initiatives, site performance becomes increasingly critical, especially when it comes to mobile efforts. A speedy and consistent online shopping experience will take customers through checkout. If page load speed is lagging, shoppers will be quick to leave and head to Amazon or a competitor. Overall, a faster site translates to more sales, and many brands agree. By optimizing the eCommerce site for performance, not only will the online shopping experience be consistent and fast, the website will be armed and organized against threats, such as becoming non-compliant to privacy laws, exposing customer data, or experiencing significant performance anomalies due to increases in traffic or third party failures.
• According to TotalRetail, one second of page delay could cost Amazon.com USD 1.6 billion in annual revenue. But scraping this one second is a complex task, especially for online retail, with websites all about product images. Consumers require to see high-quality photos of a product from every angle before they click "Add to Cart." A large number of high-resolution images mean large page sizes and a proportionally large chance of a slow-loading page. According to a report, if users have to wait longer than five seconds for a page to load, they're 20 percent more likely to leave a website without buying anything, and chances are, they'll never come back. So even though the picture quality is essential, excellent web performance plays quite a vital role in e-commerce.
• Google Lighthouse Score is a popular method used by online retailers to measure performance for mobile devices on chrome browsers only. According to the 2020 e-commerce leaders survey report, retail leaders are trying to get high scores by investing in web performance solutions in 2020. By meeting the standard framework for fast-loading mobile pages, brands can hit a more top mobile SEO ranking, driving more traffic to their sites and potentially boosting their Lighthouse Score. However, 28%, including the most prominent brands surveyed, do not believe Google Lighthouse data is an accurate representation of their site's performance, and 69% understand the Google Lighthouse Score is comparing their complex e-commerce site to simple, non-eCommerce sites.
• According to SEMrush, since 52% of consumers are trying to implement social distancing, more people are shopping online for a growing number of new product categories. So, it is not just about a rapid rise in online purchases but also about the nature of that demand. Some of the biggest retail chains have already been announcing that they are expanding their e-commerce sales, but COVID-19 has expedited this process. And although these businesses may seem to be better equipped to serve the customer needs, this shift is spanning out of control due to the pandemic. Consumers start purchasing in categories that weren't forecasted to see such a rapid rise in online shopping. Web performance became a critical priority for retailers, as users expect instant, secure, and reliable access to online shopping, from any device and location.

North America is Expected to Hold Significant Share

• Most people working on the websites being built are working on fast laptops, on wired or relatively quick connections within the North American region. A user of a website could instead be on a mobile device and mobile network, a computer outside of the U.S., or a system that is congested or just plain slow. Being on a network outside the United States could mean an extra 150 milliseconds in round trip time to the server due to the long distance the signal has to travel translates to seconds more time in loading a page. Various types of networks, such as satellite networks, have much higher round trip times, leading to longer times while loading a page. When considering the speed of site loading, it's essential to deploy adequate web performance solutions to know the web site's performance in such a situation.
• The U.S. Web Design Systems (USWDS) is a government organization that provides principles, guidance, and code to help various users design and build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites and digital services. According to USWDS, as technology becomes more prevalent in the United States, it's more common than the primary way Americans interact with the government is through the web. Ensuring that government sites perform swiftly for all ensures that all the users in the American religion have a better user experience and aren't blocked from the web services they require, tacking and improving a site's performance is the primary step for ensuring that a website can reach as full of a userbase as possible.
• The prevalence of mobile usage of websites in the region also significantly contributes to a site's speed for a customer. According to the Digital analytics program run by USWDS, roughly 37% of traffic to government sites is from mobile devices. While wired and wi-fi networks provide reliable performance, mobile networks can rapidly change from fast 4G connections to relatively slow 3G connections, to periods of being disconnected. Smaller devices, such as mobile phones, don't have adequate CPU power to quickly download and process multiple resources. By limiting the measurement of the performance of a site to just a user on a fast connection and device, a considerable amount of the site's user base could be left with a site that's very difficult to use and interact with, due to poor performance.
• The companies present in the region are updating their existing web performance solutions. For instance, in August 2019, SolarWinds, a US-based IT management solution provider, announced updates to their web performance monitoring (WPM) solutions, Web Performance Monitor 3.0, and Pingdom. Web Performance Monitor, which is part of SolarWinds' Orion Platform, tracks the performance of internally-developed websites and web-based applications. The updates are made to make it easier for users with complex IT infrastructures, including hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments, to observe website and web application performance. For Pingdom, SolarWinds has added the latest website application performance monitoring features with these updates.

Competitive Landscape

The Web Performance Market is quite competitive moderately fragmented due to the presence of significant players such as Akamai Technologies, Inc., Micro Focus International PLC, IBM Corporation, F5, Inc., etc. The players in the market are launching innovative solutions and forming partnerships to increase their market share.

• July 2020 - F5 unveiled Silverline Shape Defense, a solution that protects websites from the rising tide of fake internet traffic. F5's Silverline managed security services improve web security and performance and bridge the resources gap of skilled cybersecurity professionals that are needed to address the latest cyber threats in real-time.
• May 2020 - Cisco announced it's intent to acquire ThousandEyes, Inc. and will incorporate its capabilities in the AppDynamics application intelligence section to enhance visibility across the enterprise, web, and the cloud. The acquisition will enable a more in-depth and broader profile to pinpoint deficiencies and improve the web and application performance across all networks the business relies on by allowing end-to-end visibility when accessing cloud applications.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support