Introduction
In today's fast-paced digital world, user experience is paramount. Online auction platforms, like any other e-commerce website, must prioritize page load performance to ensure a seamless and enjoyable experience for their users. However, the stakes are even higher for auction platforms, as they require real-time updates and instantaneous interactions to maintain the excitement and competitiveness of the bidding process. In this regard, online auction platforms can learn a lot from the gaming industry, which has long prioritized performance and user experience.
In this blog post, we will explore the importance of page load performance for online auction platforms and how they can take cues from the gaming industry to optimize their performance.
The Importance of Page Load Performance in Online Auctions
Online auctions are time-sensitive events where every second counts. Users need to be able to place bids, monitor the progress of auctions, and receive real-time updates on the status of their bids. Any delay in page load times can lead to missed opportunities, user frustration, and ultimately, a loss of trust in the platform.
Moreover, online auction platforms often cater to a global audience, making it crucial to ensure that users from different geographical locations experience the same level of performance. Slow page load times can result in users abandoning the platform in favor of competitors with better performance, leading to a loss of revenue and market share.
The gaming industry has long understood the importance of performance and user experience. Game developers invest heavily in optimizing their games to run smoothly on a wide range of devices and network conditions. Online auction platforms can learn from the gaming industry's best practices and apply them to their own platforms. Some key areas to focus on include:
1. Optimizing Content Delivery: Gaming companies often use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to distribute their games and updates to users worldwide. CDNs cache content on servers located close to users, reducing latency and improving load times. Online auction platforms can leverage CDNs to ensure that their content is delivered quickly and efficiently to users around the globe.
CyberAuctions uses a third-party service that manages, optimizes, and delivers images and videos for faster pages. The service isn’t cheap, but we have found through our testing that our customers stay on our site for longer periods than our competitors. The servers also take advantage of delivering the images in the next generation WebP format. Images saved in the WebP format are 34% smaller than jpegs.
2. Efficient Resource Management: Games are designed to run smoothly even on low-end devices by optimizing the use of system resources. Auction platforms can adopt similar strategies, such as compressing images, minifying JavaScript and CSS files, and using efficient data structures to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and processed.
3. Adaptive Streaming: Online games often use adaptive streaming techniques to adjust the quality of the game based on the user's network conditions. Auction platforms can implement similar techniques to ensure that users with slower connections still have a smooth experience, even if it means sacrificing some visual quality.
CyberAuctions webcast feed can deliver live video and sound in under a half second which provides a real-time experience for internet bidders and auctioneer.
4. Real-time Updates: Gaming platforms use technologies like WebSockets to enable real-time communication between the game server and the user's device. Online auction platforms can adopt similar technologies to ensure that users receive real-time updates on the status of their bids and the progress of auctions.
CyberAuctions uses a third-party provider for real-time updates. Commercial grade real-time updates ensure that the updates are provided in the correct order and the updates are done in milliseconds. Bids, notifications, totals for the bidders, totals for the sellers, totals for the auctions, timers, and bidding streams are all updated in real-time on the cyberauctions platform.
5. Hosting Provider: CyberAuctions employs a team of engineers that configure and monitor our bidding platform 24/7. CyberAuctions is hosted on AWS which is commercial grade. CyberAuctions can scale near instantly to accommodate 160,000 transactions a minute. Many bidding platforms may look okay, but can they deliver fast page loads when you have 800 bidders bidding on 2,800 lots at once?