Spar India, you need to fix the website
Our family saw the banners all across Bangalore and we were excited about an additional option to get our kitchen needs from Spar India.
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Today morning, my wife went ahead and started adding the items that she needs to buy. After about 15mins or so, I heard some loud swearing. Out of the many, there were the likes of;
- This site sucks. Whoever designed and developed this must have just woken up from a 10 year sleep.
- Who will ever use this? I’m tapping hard enough but its not going anywhere.
- I think, I lost all the items. I can’t move ahead.
- Ok. I give up. Let’s pop in in the afternoon and buy from the store.
Well, I guess that didn’t go well. I decided to spend some time and do a quick analysis of the Spar India web app. That’s when I realize the sorry state it was in.
I’m not even talking about the horrifying bad user experience and the meaningless smeared all over the place.
Really Bad Performance Score on Google PageSpeed Test
This is like the mafia of shitty shit for a website from a brand such as Spar. I went ahead and did a quick Speed test on WebPageTest too.
Here are some quick observations for the speed test seen on a fast 3G connection for Spar India.
- The first byte load is really slow. This is an indicator of a bad architectural design when it comes to static resource allocation.
- It takes almost half a minute to load their website.
- The images are the villain here and is killing everything.
I was really hoping the nightmare was over and the dawn was round the corner. I was wrong when I went in to see the generated HTML source code. I’m even guessing this is the code as written on the IDE and not some generated or massaged via a routine/automation or anything of that sort.
Well, those are the quick notes of for Spar India’s new Web App, which needs lots of work — perhaps a re-work from scratch and with some actual designers, and engineers who knows a thing or two about modern frontend development.
Spar India really need to fix the User Interface Designs, the User Experience Designs, and write better, optimized frontend code.
On a separate note, if you’re interested in frontend optimization for a better Return on Investment, you should read the three part series of the ABOF’s optimization story — one, two, three.
