[Research]: CDN Enabled Sites are Slower!

A new research by Radware reveals that ".. while 75% of the top 100 retail websites employ a Content Delivery Network (CDN), the median home page takes a full second longer to become interactive than the median page that does not use a CDN .. Radware’s latest research shows that the median time to interact (TTI) for CDN enabled sites was 5.7 seconds compared to the median TTI of 4.7 for non-CDN websites".

Kent Alstad [pictured], Radware's VP of Acceleration explains: “This finding should not be interpreted as a criticism of content delivery networks. Instead, it should create awareness that CDNs address just one aspect of the performance problem. Web pages today are bigger and more complicated than ever, and CDNs can only partially mitigate this growth and complexity. Site owners need to be aware that there are performance issues caused by the pages themselves, and these performance issues require additional solutions.”

Other key findings:

1. The median web page has slowed down by 47% since 2012.
2. The median page takes 5.4 seconds to become interactive. 
3. The top 100 sites are slower than the top 500.
4. Most sites fail to leverage best practices for optimizing images.

See "New Radware Research Reveals eRetailers that use a Content Delivery Network Experience Slower Page Load Times than eRetailers that do not" - here.