Why Is Old Navy Website So Slow? Here Are The Reasons

Old Navy was founded in 1994 by Dayton Hudson Corporation (the parent company of Gap, and Target) as a less expensive version of Gap. The division quickly grew to over $1 billion in revenues within four years and is today one of the most popular clothing and accessory brands in the US. The Old Navy website is a subdomain on the Gap website.

A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores the Old Navy website 19 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 34 on Performance.

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

• Bloated JavaScript files
• Absence of lazyloading
• Slow server
• Inefficient Scrolling Performance
• Ineffective Caching Policy

Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that Old Navy can make its 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

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

The Old Navy website can be as much as 5.57 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 Old Navy homepage can load as much as 2.48 seconds faster if images were lazyloaded.

Slow server

According to the Lighthouse report, a slow server may be contributing to nearly 0.68 seconds of additional loading time. In addition to upgrading the server hardware and database systems, Old Navy should also look into the server’s application logic to prepare pages faster.

Inefficient Scrolling Performance

When you load Old Navy, you may notice a scroll jank – that is, the page stops responding to clicks and scrolls for a bit before catching up. This happens because the Old Navy website contains a bunch of JavaScript files with ‘active listeners’ that prevent the browser from scrolling until they are completely loaded. This can be easily avoided by the use of passive listeners – just a small tweak to code that can make your page load more seamlessly.

Ineffective Caching Policy

A website like Old Navy 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 Old Navy, however, the cache for most media files clear is deleted every 60 minutes. This means that the website is loaded completely from scratch any time you visit after 60 minutes. Enabling a longer cache period could make loading pages faster and more user-friendly.