A Framework to Improve Performance of E-Commerce Websites

Introduction

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become an important channel for information retrieval, electronic commerce and entertainment. However, long Web page download times have remained a major cause of frustration among Web users. According to the findings of the surveys conducted by Lightner et al, (1996) and the GVU (Graphic, Visualization and Usability) Centre at Georgia Institute of Technology (GVU, 1998), long download times have always been a major problem experienced by Web users. The survey by Pitkow et al, (1996) also indicates that the most widely cited problem using the WWW was that it took too long to download Web pages (i.e. 69% of respondents cited this problem). This problem is worsened by the exponential increase in the number of Web users over the years and the popularity of multimedia (e.g. video, voice) technology. This problem is so noticeable that Web users often equate the “WWW” acronym with “World Wide Wait”! According to The long waiting time for downloading Web pages is often not tolerable even in the wired environment. Due to the increasing and excessive use of multimedia data (i.e. audio and video clips) on Web pages, this concern is continuously growing. The problem of ‘long download time’ is relevant not only to Web users but also to the authors and designers of websites, as websites that take a long time to download are rarely or less frequently visited (Reaux et al, 1997). The authors (G. Sreedhar et al, 2017) suggested in their research work slow Loading pages affects the sales and longer negative effect and 40% on line shoppers feel comfortable to revisit if the website load quickly.