Why Web Performance is important

Last week I was talking about website optimization and performance – How you could speed up your website. If you haven’t read it, you can take a look here.

So, why is web performance important?

It’s actually a good question, because most people, and even companies that own websites don’t know how their website perform, and they don’t care about it. What they care about is that they make money, and get a lot of visitors. But they don’t care about performance.

There is 2 things here that doesn’t make sense.

Make money but don’t care about performance

The best way to make money on a website, is to get a lot of visitors, visitors that is happy, and that wants to visit your site again. Customers or visitors want things served right in front of them, and they don’t want to wait, which means, a slow loading website means that customers often will leave your site, and find a new one where they can get what they need, but faster. And they will stick to that website, recommend it to their friends and family.

I’ve heard a lot of visitors for the portals we have at the company I work for, as soon as we see an issue, something that made the performance go wrong, they start complain as seen below:

Not only the image above shows that having a lower websites frustrate people, it also makes you lose money. Which no one wants to do.

Back in 2006 Amazon announced that for each 100 milliseconds amazon will lose 1% in revenue. 100 milliseconds isn’t a lot, to set it in perspective, when you blink with your eye, it takes around 300 milliseconds, just to do a single blink.

Also studies confirm that 57% of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load. And 80% of those consumers will never return to the website again. Half of these 80% will go tell others about their negative experience.

Let’s break this down:
1000 people visit your site, it takes 4 seconds to load, 570 people in average will leave the site, 456 people will never come back to your site, and 228 people will tell other people how your site sucks.

Shopzilla optimized their website from having a load time of 6 seconds, to load in 1.2 seconds, it increased their revenue by 12% and page view by a huge 25%

Yahoo announced that for each 400 milliseconds they improve their site, it gave them 9% increase in traffic.

Making the Mozilla website 2.2 seconds faster, could increase the amount of downloads of Firefox by 60 million a year.

All these numbers is taken from big companies, that already have a big customer base, optimizing your website is one of the ways you can save money, make money and get more visitors, Web performance is just as important as SEO, because google even ranks your webpage based on the loading time. 2 websites, same content, same amount of visitors, if one website takes 2 seconds to load, and another takes 6 seconds to load. The one on 2 seconds will rank better in Google.