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"If you're in the market for Opening Day baseball tickets, you might want to avoid some of the biggest names in online ticket selling, according to research by one web optimization company.\nJoshua Bixby, a baseball fan and president of Vancouver-based Strangeloop Networks, tested transaction times for several online ticket vendors, including major players MLB.com, Ticketmaster and StubHub. He used the speed-tracking tool WebPageTest.org. \nOver multiple trials, he recorded the amount of time it took for sites to load, beginning from the site homepage all the way through the ticket-purchasing process. He didn't include the amount of time it took to navigate between links. But he did track the number of resources \u2014 such as JavaScript, CSS files and images \u2014 that each site required his browser to load. \nHere are Bixby's findings, ranked from fastest to slowest, provided exclusive to Mashable: \n\nCheapMLBtickets.com: 12.08 seconds average total loading time; 158 resources downloaded\nFindTicketsFast.com: 15.03 seconds; 121 resources\nStubHub.com: 23.52 seconds; 265 resources\nTicketsNow.com: 24.61 seconds; 319 resources\nTickets.com: 28.12 seconds; 324 resources\nTicketNetwork.com: 31.72 seconds; 210 resources\nTicketmaster.com: 39.67 seconds; 489 resources\nMLB.com: 43.37 seconds; 636 resources\n\nFor comparison, Bixby ran a similar test on eBay, and found a loading time of 12.2 seconds with 168 resources, almost identical to CheapMLBtickets.com. He also tried MLB.com on an iPhone over a 3G network (46 seconds, ended in a error) and on an iPad over a wi-fi network (62 seconds).\nSo why the big differences in transaction times? By and large, the sites with more resources to download were the ones with the longer delays. Bixby blames that on a \"tug of war\" between site performance and the desire to host advertising and other images.\n\"So far the tug of war has been won by the marketers and the image-makers,\" he says. \"What's happening is that performance is a key feature and it's kind of being neglected in some cases.\" \nBixby says slower sites can improve performance \u2014 and subsequently discourage customers abandoning transactions \u2014 by streamlining pages to load fewer resources and by cutting the number of pages in the transaction process. As people continue to turn to mobile devices for shopping more frequently \u2014 and still prefer to buy via mobile sites over apps \u2014 transaction speed will only grow in importance. \nHave you abandoned an online purchase because of slow loading times? Let us know in the comments. \nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, Clicknique"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/03/26/strangeloop-baseball-tickets-sites/>