Why Is Nike Website So Slow? Here Are The Reasons

Nike is one of the most popular American athletic wear retailers, and that needs no introduction.

A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores the Nike website 8.3 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 43 on Performance.

There are many reasons why the Nike website is so slow. This includes:

• Absence of text compression
• Bloated JavaScript files
• Absence of lazyloading
• Unnecessarily large image files
• Too many redirects

Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that Nike 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. 

Absence of text compression

The Nike website uses a lot of text files – including JavaScript. Loading all these different files can take a lot of time. This can be easily avoided if these files were served in a compressed format (like GZip, or Brotli). According to the Lighthouse speed report, Nike can save as much as 0.15 seconds during page load just by compressing text files.

Bloated JavaScript files

Nike uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. Nike can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.

The Nike website can be as much as 3 seconds faster by adopting this technique.

Absence of lazyloading

Images and videos are by far the most resource-intensive assets and take up a lot of bandwidth during the page-loading process. This can be a real problem on shopping websites since they typically include a lot of graphical content.

But here is the thing – a user who visits the website is not going to need all the images on the page to load. Instead, they only need those images on the top fold of the website to load. The rest can be ‘lazy-loaded’ – that is, they can be loaded after all the other critical components of the webpage have completed loading.

The Nike homepage can load as much as 3.15 seconds faster if images were lazyloaded.

Unnecessarily large image files

Another common problem that users face – especially when they access the website while on the move – is having to load unnecessarily large image files that are not optimized for the mobile phone. Not everyone has access to WiFi at all times. Loading oversized product images is unnecessary.

According to the Lighthouse estimate, the Nike website homepage can load 0.15 seconds faster if it made all the images more cellular-data-friendly.

Too many redirects

If you have been trying to access Nike from a different country, you may face an additional lag time owing to the server taking time to find the right version of the website to serve you. Redirection could also be an issue if the website has not been set up right, and there are multiple versions of your website (one with www, and another without www, for instance) that takes time to resolve. Nikesees an additional delay of 1.92 seconds due to this issue.