Website failures can have disastrous impact on the business, more so, because of the online commerce boom. Nearly 80 percent of senior executives in the Asia Pacific region reported lost sales due to poor website performance, according to a study published by Dyn Research in March 2015. The study noted, even though countries like India, China, Hong Kong and Malaysia are the fastest growing markets for online sales worldwide, 30 percent of executives didn’t know how their company measured the performance of their customers’ experience.
CarWale (carwale.com), an Indian online portal on car pricing and related information was looking to improve its site performance. The site, an active online community that helps buyers find the right car through reviews, news, pricing, as well as its sister site, BikeWale (BikeWale.com), provides similar resources on new and used bikes prices and values, were looking to improve the performance of the respective websites, while at the same time, wanted to focus on their core business.
On the challenges faced by the company, Rajeev Kumar, VP – Technology at CarWale, (an Automotive Exchange Private Limited company) explained, “As an online business, Internet Performance is extremely important to us. In fact, improving DNS performance was the first step we needed to take to make sure the visitor experience was the best.”
It needs to be mentioned that DNS check is one vital part to our daily internet life. If it fails, businesses will be in trouble. For example, visitors would be seeing Page Not Found pretty much all day long. If it’s slow, it can be extremely annoying, as technology enthusiast and writer Prita Mitra noted, “DNS is like the electricity. If it’s fast, most of us probably would don’t even know if it’s existed.”
“We want to focus on improving the CarWale and BikeWale sites rather than having to manage their underlying infrastructure. Rather than managing DNS on our own, we wanted to outsource this function,” said Kumar.
The company evaluated several Managed DNS service providers, and Dyn, a cloud-based Internet Performance company emerged as a strong option. Dyn’s global anycast network has over 18 points of presence (PoPs) globally, assuring high site availability, speed, DNS, DDoS, security, and infrastructure cost efficiencies for a better end user experience.
The vendor also backs its Managed DNS solution with unparalleled DNS domain expertise, extreme system scalability and a focus on customer support. The company therefore selected Dyn’s solution on website performance.
On implementing the solution, the online commerce firm noticed a measurable decrease in DNS latency. “Since implementing Dyn, DNS latency has measurably decreased and helped improve site performance,” said Kumar.
“Tracking latency through Google Analytics, we’ve seen an improvement from 40 to 30 milliseconds after moving onto the Dyn service. Our customers are able to get a faster response from the site and their overall experience has improved,” he informed.
A May 2013 research undertaken by Vanson Bourne, had shown that even minor delays to website response times can have a sizable impact on customer satisfaction, page views, conversion rates and site abandonment.
Despite this, over one-third of the organizations globally do not know if their website is monitored on a regular basis, the research noted. However, companies that want to stay competitive and focus strongly on customer experience ensure that their website performance is steady.
In a March 24 article published on CXOtoday.com, Naveen Gurusiddaiah, Head-Pre Sales at Micro Focus India, mentioned, “Businesses need to ensure their websites are able to withstand high amounts of traffic at peak periods, as well as being able to perform to a standard their customer now expects.”
Quoting the Vanson Bourne study, Gurusiddaiah said, “Users have very little patience with poor performing websites today as 88% of online visitors are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.”
A downtime can not only result in loss of revenue, but also hit the brand reputation in the long run. On the other hand, a solid performing website is still a competitive advantage, and that any company delivering an equally good web experience on mobile is likely to win the customer retention and acquisition battle, he added.
“Companies need a smart strategy for approaching international markets,” Jim Cowie, chief scientist, Dyn mentioned as part of its research. “The only true way forward is by constantly monitoring how your assets perform for your customers, controlling outside factors like ISPs and using that information to optimize the Internet Performance experience,” he summed up.
