Shopzilla Proves that Time is Money in Shopping Search

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Shopzilla, Inc, a leading global comparison shopping network, opened its doors to SpeedGeeks L.A., a Southern California meetup focused on delivering high performance websites. The theme of this SpeedGeek L.A. inaugural event was how faster websites result in better consumer experience, deeper engagement, and ultimately a boost to the bottom line.

Google’s Steve Souders kicked off the event by encouraging all attendees to be “fast by default” and speaking about the positive correlation between web and business performance across various sites from Search to Sports. “Recent data released from Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Shopzilla, and Netflix show that faster websites result in a better user experience, increased revenue, and lower operating costs. Web performance optimization is a critical ingredient for any site that wants to remain competitive on the web,” said Souders. Additionally, Souders highlighted that decreasing page load time can lead to improved longer term effects on the site’s brand awareness.

From large ecommerce sites like Shopzilla, to major search engines such as Google and Bing, the industry has proven that faster websites ultimately boost the bottom line. Co-host, Phil Dixon, VP of Engineering at Shopzilla, continued the morning’s presentations by sharing with fellow SpeedGeeks the impact of a two-year initiative to overhaul the Shopzilla.com site and content delivery infrastructure. Shopzilla started its redesign project in 2006. At that time, companies had yet to quantify the connection between performance and the bottom line. At the conception of the project, the Shopzilla team committed to measuring site performance as it related to load time throughout the project lifecycle. Knowing it was a design decision, the team considered it from day one. “We were surprised to the extent to which speed impacted the bottom line, from a lift in revenue to dramatic reductions in operational costs. Our redesign produced a 7-12% increase in revenue and a 50% drop in server load, thanks to faster performance,” said Dixon.

Speakers from Edmonds, Picasa, Heroku, MySpace, dynaTrace, and Oracle addressed the various facets of improving web performance. Paddy Hannon from Edmunds tackled a holistic approach including the process, a focus on metrics, and building the team. Jeremy Custenborder and the team at MySpace shared an open-source project performance analysis tool called MSFast, and previewed a similar tool for Flash.

Over 170 members of the LA web development community attended the event to learn about new applications for enhanced speed and to share their own experiences. The event provided an opportunity for the LA web development community to network and collaborate with some of the top leaders in website performance, including Google, MySpace, Shopzilla, Edmunds and more. When asked about the impetus for the event, Dixon stated, “We are pleased to be part of conferences like SpeedGeeks. When we began the process of redesigning our site for speed, there wasn’t much data in the market to help us understand the importance of load time and what it would mean for our sites. With all the tools and data now available, we were excited to share our story with the local web development community on how we tackled the issue of slow performance and the types of impact we saw.”

About Shopzilla, Inc.:

Shopzilla, Inc. is one of the largest and most comprehensive online shopping networks on the web. Through its leading comparison shopping sites, BizRate.com, BizRate.co.uk, Shopzilla.com, and Shopzilla.co.uk, Shopzilla helps shoppers find the best value for virtually anything they want to buy from thousands of online retailers. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with an international office in London, Shopzilla operates sites in the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany. Shopzilla, Inc. is owned by Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. (NYSE:SNI), which include national lifestyle TV networks such as HGTV, The Food Network, Fine Living and more.