Data Illustrating the Benefits of Improved Page Load Times

with 10 comments

Last week I promised you some data about why reducing HTTP requests the most important thing for improving page load speed.

  • Shopzilla: reduced page load time by 3.5 seconds and all sorts of good things happened…the highlights: conversion increased by 7%, page views by 25% (1)
  • AOL: 3x improvements in page views per visit based on page load times (1)
  • Google and Bing: increasing page load time by as little as 200 milliseconds causes measurable declines in usage (1)
  • Google Maps: decreasing page size by 20-30% resulted in 10% increase in traffic (2)
  • Amazon: increasing page load time by 100 milliseconds decreases conversion by 1% (2)

The data shows unequivocally that reducing HTTP requests is really important for improving site performance and key business metrics.  And, I would argue, that 75% of developers think this type of work is a lot of fun.   So, here’s the funny thing about this: why can’t business people and technology people get aligned?

This is one of the things that always drove me nuts at back in the heyday at drugstore.com: the business people would want to grow, so they’d advocate for new ideas.  Those ideas were unproven and uncertain, and the majority of them failed.  That’s okay…the nature of new ideas is that most of them fail.  Just check out small business success rates.

Yet, here’s the thing: right in front of every business person is a proven, certain and quantifiable project that can improve critical business metrics.  It’s called “Improve Page Load Speed”.  So, if you’re a technical type, perhaps you should forward a link to this blog post to the business folks in order to get a site optimization project on the schedule.

Sources:

  1. Nicolle Sullivan‘s AEA Seattle presentation [excerpt]
  2. Andrew King, Website Optimization, Page 148

Written by scottporad

April 26th, 2010 at 10:00 am

Posted in Technology

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10 Responses to 'Data Illustrating the Benefits of Improved Page Load Times'

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  1. Thanks for collecting, and sharing, Scott — I keep wondering if there is a set benchmark for where you absolutely MUST be, where the next step change benefits hit, and where the absolute optimal place to be is. You may have previously posted it, but I think that benchmarking is going to be very attractive to your readership, especially as it compares across industries (i.e. performance needs may be different with Amazon/commerce than with Cheezburger/media/entertainment).

    Dave Schappell

    26 Apr 10 at 10:09 am

  2. It looks like there might be a typo in the third bullet. I’m guessing it should say “Increasing page load time.”

    Jesse Brown

    26 Apr 10 at 10:26 am

  3. Yes, thank you…corrected.

    scottporad

    26 Apr 10 at 10:36 am

  4. You must have some form of caching on your blog, because I’m still seeing the third bullet with the typo. Its rather confusing as it contradicts the intent of the article.

    Mike MacDonald

    26 Apr 10 at 10:56 am

  5. I think it’s fixed now. Do you still see the problem?

    scottporad

    26 Apr 10 at 11:01 am

  6. @Dave Chapelle I hear what you’re saying…it would be nice if there was some guideline or benchmark to know at what point diminishing returns had been reached. However, doesn’t the diminishing returns equation involve opportunity cost, so it would be different for each company…right?

    scottporad

    26 Apr 10 at 11:05 am

  7. Thanks for the follow up, Scott. Another aspect of this is search engine rankings. Google has started to include performance as one vector in computing search engine result rankings. Although the impact is small, this has tangible effects on traffic and thus on revenue for ad driven sites, so performance ought to be something that the UX people, devs and the business folks can all align on.

    Joe H

    26 Apr 10 at 11:58 am

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