Online travel agency Travelocity is the first travel site committed to trying a new TagMan system that claims it can improve website performance.
The third version of the TagMan system is aimed at addressing the problem on which its previous incarnations were based: placing tags on a website to monitor activity actually end up slowing a service down.
TagMan, a service used by a string of ecommerce sites including Travelocity and Virgin Atlantic to allow better management of tags from third party tracking systems, admits that the bits of code that websites use to track online traffic, interaction and quality of service are not helping, often impinging on a site's own performance.
The company says Forrester research shows that 40% of consumers abandon websites if they have to wait for more than three seconds for a page to load, but the tagging systems employed by ecommerce sites can slow down a site massively.
For example, many ecommerce sites have around five to seven tags per page, but each of the tags can cost a site around 0.25 seconds to load.
The new TagMan service claims to use a number of tools (parallel loading of tags, preloading tags and tag "killing") to help manage the problem.