Why is Front End Performance Optimization Important?

Web Site Speed Affects your bottom line. Take a look at this data by the Internet Leading Web Sites:

• Amazon’s experiment: Slowing pages by 100ms decreased sales by 1%
  Source: Presentation by Greg Linden at Stanford, 2007
• “When the Google Maps home page was put on a diet, shrunk from 100K to about 70K to 80K, traffic was up 10 percent the first week and in the following three weeks, 25 percent more”
  Source: Google’s Marissa Mayer: Speed wins | ZDNet.com, 2006
• Microsoft Live Search:
  Experiment slowed search results page by 1 second
  • Queries/User declined 1.0%
  • Ad Clicks/User declined 1.5%

  Slowed page by 2 seconds

  • Queries/User declined 2.5%
  • Ad Clicks/User declined 4.4%

  Source: Kohavi, R., “Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO” PDF, 2007

• JupiterResearch survey at 2006: one-third of online consumers cited site slowness as the main reason for their dissatisfaction with a site. It becomes more important for higher value shoppers and for more experienced shoppers
  Source: “Boosting Online Commerce Profitability with Akamai”
  http://www.akamai.com/html/perspectives/whitepapers_content.html
  
• A 50% degradation in performance leads to a 25% reduction in conversions – Jupiter Research.28% of Web users do not return to a company’s Web site if it does not perform sufficiently well, and a further 6% do not even go to the affiliated retail store anymore – Boston Consulting Group.

  Nearly 50% of Internet users have stopped using a preferred site for some amount of time because of slow download times and poor customer experience – Jupiter Research.

  Not only does page performance determine whether or not visitors hang out at given sites, it directly influences their attitudes towards returning—58% note performance as a key determinant as to whether they’ll visit again – Forrester Research

  Source: “The Impact of Web Performance on E-Retail Success”
  http://www.akamai.com/html/perspectives/whitepapers_content.html