The results are in: Flixmedia's load speed and response times

Flixmedia enriches e-commerce experiences for millions of shoppers every day, and we’re constantly working on load speed optimisation. The latest initiative to deliver improvements in page load speed has been a major content syndication platform upgrade. In order to assess the impact of this we’ve done some testing; the results are shown below.

How we support critical performance metrics for online conversion

A one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%. Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics set a new standard for performance and directly affect page ranking in Google’s search results. That’s why the load speed and performance of syndicated content matter.

“By listening to our retailers' needs and KPIs, and delivering a new best-in-class syndication platform, we are delighted to find independent results that rank Flixmedia as the fastest syndicator in the field.”

Before we go further, we’ve taken the time to write a helpful explainer on the Google Core Web Vitals terminology here.

Overview of the Performance Testing

We conducted performance testing across our core syndication services (INpages, MiniSites and Hotspots). We also compared our flagship INpages service with other comparable syndication services and providers (like-for-like).

Testing Tool and Methodology

Tests were conducted using a trusted, independent, third-party tool: Sematext Synthetics Monitoring Tool.

Our Content Delivery Response Tests ran every five minutes over a ten-day period from different locations across the globe, measuring two KPIs:

1. Response Time/Location

2. Availability

Our Web Vitals Browser Test ran every ten minutes over a ten-day period, measuring three KPIs:

1. Time To First Byte (TTFB)

2. First Contentful Paint (FCP)

3. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The results

It is important to note that the amount of content syndicated to an individual product page can differ hugely by product, category or brand. Here at Flixmedia, we have sophisticated platform capabilities to deliver more complex assets to support rich content for our brands. For this reason, it is therefore best to measure load speed performance as milliseconds per kilobyte, providing a true like-for-like measurement of how fast we can load content on retailer pages. We also understand how important it is to deliver content with low latency so that the total page speed is kept to a minimum.

By listening to our retailers' needs and KPIs, and delivering a new best-in-class syndication platform, we are delighted to find independent results that rank Flixmedia as the fastest syndicator in the field.

Average response times were tested across the core Flixmedia products in different content delivery network (CDN) locations. We are delighted to report that we scored a ‘Good’ rating for the vast majority of our results in almost all locations; in some locations the CDN performance itself is the bottleneck, which is an area we can optimise in the future.

Our average response time for INpages also performed well in comparison to similar companies. The results show that Flixmedia’s average response time is consistently the fastest amongst the content syndicators, for content comparable to Flixmedia INpages.

Availability

Availability results also show that, over the ten-day period, all syndicators demonstrated high availability across the board.

Google Core Web Vitals Timings

On average Flixmedia syndicates 50% of the PDP content via INpages; the remaining 50% is delivered by the retailer. All Google Core Web Vitals scores for INpages are within the 'Good’ range. Moreover, we are significantly below the upper bound of the 'Good’ threshold in all tests, the FCP score being only 24.5% of the highest acceptable time for a good rating.

Conclusions

These page load speed tests demonstrate the robustness and scalability of Flixmedia’s content syndication platform by delivering great results, and meeting industry standards across the globe.

Flixmedia outperforms similar content syndicators on most measures. The Google Core Web Vitals test demonstrated that our syndication services are meeting industry standards in delivering a great shopper experience on e-commerce websites.

Google Core Web Vitals is an area where there are opportunities to continuously improve. In future roadmap developments, Flixmedia will be investigating content compression and caching for those areas where the testing has shown room for improvement.