2012/06/09
Web performance is of critical importance for driving hits and revenue however most mobile web sites still don't pay enough attention to performance or reliability. Many sites take more then 10s to load including Marks & Spencer (14.18s), eBay (14.78s), Ikea (28.08s), Macy's (26.52s) and many more as listed in the Keynote Mobile Index. The majority of developers, product owners and stakeholders are more interested in features that look cool, like fancy animated graphics, and are not concerned with features that are of real importance to users. Does the user really care about fancy animations? If you take amazon for example they have a very simple but effective site. It works reliably and does exactly what you expect and it only takes 6.51s to load. Many studies have shown the critical importance of web performance on the profit:
- 47% expect page load < 2s
- 40% abandon sites with page load > 3s
- +1s → -7% conversion rate
- if $100,000 per day, +1s → $2.5 million lost sales every year
- Bing
- +1s → -4% revenue
- Google
- 0.4s to 0.9s → -25% searches (-$2.5 billion revenue)
- Firefox
- -2.2s download page → +15% downloads (+1.7 million extra / year)
- Shopzilla
- -5s → +7-12% revenue, -50% hardware cost
- Wallmart & Amazon
- every -100ms → +1% revenue
http://www.keynote.com/keynote_competitive_research/performance_indices/mobile/retail/index.html
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/category/website-optimization
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast.html
http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com