American Eagle Outfitters(https://www.ae.com/) is a lifestyle brand based out of Pennsylvania, USA. It was founded in 1977 and is available both online and in retail stores.
A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores the American Eagle website 15.8 seconds on speed index (SI), and 24 out of 100 on Performance.
There are many reasons why the American Eagle website is so slow. This includes:
- Bloated JavaScript files
- Slow server
- Unused CSS files
- Render-blocking resources
- Old Image formats
- Large DOM size
Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that [name] can make their website load faster.
But before we do that, a quick word about our website CWVIQ.com - we are a free email alert service that sends out notification any time your website is loading very slowly (often due to heavy traffic, or poor scripts). If you have a website, consider setting up an alert so that you can fix issues before they become major. Bloated JavaScript files
American Eagle uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. American Eagle can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.
The American Eagle website can be as much as 4.89 seconds faster by adopting this technique.
Slow server
According to the Lighthouse report, a slow server may be contributing to nearly 0.6 seconds of additional loading time. In addition to upgrading the server hardware and database systems, American Eagle should also look into the server’s application logic to prepare pages faster.
Unused CSS files
American Eagle uses CSS files to load the styling elements for the website. However, this file contains a lot of unused scripts that can be slowing down page loading by as much as 0.45 seconds. Code splitting may help avoid this issue.
Render-blocking resources
There are scripts on the American Eagle website that need to run first before they let the rest of the code be executed. The render-blocking resources issue can shave off around 0.44 seconds from the loading time for the American Eagle website.
How do you avoid this? If the script is not critical, avoid having it in the <head> tag of your HTML code. But if you do need to have it there for some reason, make sure to include the defer or async attribute so that they do not block the loading of other resources.
Old Image formats
The American Eagle website uses a lot of JPG and PNG files that are considered outdated and heavy for modern web use. Replacing them with WebP and AVIF files can save as much as 0.33 seconds from the page loading time.
Large DOM size
The American Eagle website takes close to 23.5 seconds to evaluate all the scripts, parse them, compile, and render them. This can be minimized by minimizing the main-thread work.
They may also look at reducing the number of nodes in the DOM. In simpler terms, you need to make sure that the main HTML code is smaller and has fewer nodes. I have explained this in greater detail in this article about DOMContentLoaded.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of CWVIQ, and has been in the internet media space for over 15 years. He has previously served as the AVP of Products and Head of Business at popular media portals. He has worked with several SaaS and enterprise businesses as an external consultant for their SEO marketing campaigns.