Fifth Annual Index Rates Over 600 eCommerce Third Party Technologies Based on How They Impact eCommerce Site Performance

YOTTAA, Inc., the leading cloud platform for accelerating eCommerce, announced the publication of the latest version of the company’s annual index on the performance of third party technologies used on eCommerce sites. The “2023 eCommerce Technology Index” is designed to help retailers research new technologies for their sites and understand the impact third parties can have on overall site performance.

Brands and retailers are adding more and more technology to their eCommerce stack in the pursuit of conversion, traffic, and operational gain. In the past year alone, the number of third party technologies installed on a retail site increased 19% with the typical site adding seven incremental eCommerce technologies. But, beyond the innovation gains promised by these technologies, many retailers struggle to determine their impact on site speed, online experience, and conversion.

“The 2023 eCommerce Technology Index provides brands with granular performance data for third parties on their sites so they can best measure the overall impact their tech stacks are having on their business.”

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The 2023 eCommerce Technology Index examines the site performance impact of 619 of the most widely adopted eCommerce third parties. The data in this report was collected over the course of a month (December 2022) representing 5.5 billion page views from the nearly 2,000 eCommerce sites using YOTTAA’s eCommerce acceleration solutions. As part of its platform, YOTTAA’s Third Party Knowledge Base is a comprehensive repository of third party data that grows with every page view, adding hundreds of millions of real shopper data points every day.

Through this knowledge base, YOTTAA has deep visibility into site performance data from all the third parties used by its customers. The YOTTAA platform also detects site performance violations of individual third parties. These violations are used to create Performance Impact Ratings (PIR). Using these PIRs, YOTTAA assigned a color code of red, yellow, and green to each third party evaluated in the index across the most frequently adopted eCommerce technology categories. Slower loading third parties are labeled red, neutral are yellow, and faster loading technologies are green.

Below are some of the key findings from the 2023 eCommerce Technology Index:

• 17% are in the Red – Of the 619 third party eCommerce technologies rated in the index, 17% received a “red” rating meaning their presence on an eCommerce site has a consistently negative impact on site performance.

• Key Tech Features are Slow – Site performance impact varies by technology category and the categories with the most red ratings in the index are ones that are very important to brands, such as user generated content, chat, and commerce search. As a result, retailers should expect a heavier site performance impact from these categories.

• Certain Core Web Vitals are Hard to Meet – Largest Contentful Paint is the Core Web Vital metric that troubles eCommerce brands the most. The tech categories that are making it hardest for brands to meet this Google benchmark are image hosting, CMS, and tag management.

• Optimization = Faster Sites & Higher Conversions – To realize the full potential of third party technologies, each must be optimized to limit the negative impact on site performance. For example, findings show that shaving just 1 second off page load time through the optimization of 3^rd parties and other digital site elements decreases bounces by 9% and increases conversion by 6%.

“As brands continue to rely on the benefits and return on investments from third party technologies, so too must they appreciate and weigh the total cost of integration, including their impact on site performance,” said Rich Stendardo, CEO of YOTTAA. “The 2023 eCommerce Technology Index provides brands with granular performance data for third parties on their sites so they can best measure the overall impact their tech stacks are having on their business.”

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