By Tim Kadlec CHAPTER 4The Impact of Performance
Name something your business cares about and I’ll bet good money that
its performance has been an important factor. Study after study has shown
that how your site performs directly impacts how users will interact with it.
- Amazon found that for every 100ms of improved page load time, it
saw a 1% increase in revenue^2. - Bing tried an experiment where it deliberately made search queries
take two seconds longer. The result was a 4.3% decrease in revenue
per user^3. - Mozilla improved the performance of its landing page^4 by 2.2
seconds and saw a 15.4% increase in download conversions. This
roughly translates into 60 million more downloads annually. - Shopzilla cut its page load time^5 from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds. In
addition to a 12% increase in revenue, page traffic increased by 25%.
We could go on, but I think the picture is starting to become pretty
clear: improving performance affects page views, traffic — and the bot-
tom line. Performance is about respecting your visitors, and they notice
if you don’t.
- 39% of users^6 say that performance is more important to them than
the functionality of a site. - 57% of users^7 will abandon a site after waiting three seconds for the
page to load.
2 http://smashed.by/amzn-found
3 http://smashed.by/msft-performance
4 http://smashed.by/mozilla
5 http://smashed.by/shopzilla
6 http://smashed.by/slow-websites
7 http://smashed.by/3-secs