Marks & Spencer (M&S) is a multinational retailer from Britain that sells clothing, beauty products, and food and home products as well. They employ over 78,000 people worldwide and are publicly listed on the London Stock Exchange.
A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores Marks & Spencer (M&S) website 5.6 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 58 on Performance.
There are many reasons why the Marks & Spencer (M&S) website is so slow. This includes:
- Bloated JavaScript files
- Old Image formats
- Render-blocking resources
- Slow server
- Ineffective Caching Policy
Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that Marks & Spencer (M&S) 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
Marks & Spencer (M&S) uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. Marks & Spencer (M&S) can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.
The Marks & Spencer (M&S) website can be as much as 0.52 seconds faster by adopting this technique.
Old Image formats
The Marks & Spencer (M&S) website uses a lot of JPG and PNG files that are considered outdated and heavy for modern web use.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 1.2 seconds from the page loading time.
Render-blocking resources
There are scripts on the Marks & Spencer (M&S) 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 8.2 seconds from the loading time for the Marks & Spencer (M&S) 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.
Slow server
According to the Lighthouse report, a slow server may be contributing to nearly 0.9 seconds of additional loading time. In addition to upgrading the server hardware and database systems, Marks & Spencer (M&S) should also look into the server’s application logic to prepare pages faster.
Ineffective Caching Policy
A website like Marks & Spencer (M&S) is made of several components, including a lot of images, and other media files. Caching, or storing these components in your local computer, enables your browser to load the website much faster when you come back a second or third time.
With Marks & Spencer (M&S) however, the cache for most media files clear is deleted every 10 minutes. This means that the website is loaded completely from scratch any time you visit after 10 minutes. Enabling a longer cache period could make loading pages faster and more user-friendly.
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.
M and S website is abysmal I have withdrawn online orders because of website inactivity
Marks and Spencer’s website so bad have tried several times to order items now going to give up and go elsewhere, even thinking of cancelling credit card
yes its a heap of 💩 M&S web site. I phoned them, and they said it was at my end. My speed is very fast, they talk sh#t.