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Velocity and the Bottom Line
Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins
and I serving as co-chairs. Back in
November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight "best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company's bottom line." Much of my work focuses on the how of improving performance - tips developers use to create even faster web sites. What's been missing is the why. Why is it important for companies to focus on performance?
That question was answered at Velocity last week by speakers from AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Shopzilla.
These case studies provide real world numbers that show the benefits of making your site faster. Other Velocity sessions share techniques for implementing performance improvements, including sessions from me, Doug Crockford, and the Facebook and Google frontend teams. But what about the user experience? In his session, Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame) makes sure we remember the importance of how the user feels while interacting with our site: That's why [performance] is important and why we should be obsessed and not be discouraged when it doesn't change the funnel. My theory here is when an interface is faster, you feel good. And ultimately what that comes down to is you feel in control. The web app isn't controlling me, I'm controlling it. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Thanks to the Velocity speakers & their organizations for overcoming the many challenges required to present this data for the first time. We're now equipped with the financial justification, the technical know-how, and the visceral motivation to go out and make the Web a faster place. We'll have more performance success stories next year. Your company could be one of them! Capture your performance improvements and bottom line impact. We'd love to hear from you at Velocity 2010.
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Comments: 5
Jan [ 6 July 2009 05:17 AM]
It would be cool to see the incremental revenue vs. page load time curve. Our homepage currently loads in about 1.6 seconds, I am unsure whether squeezing an additional 400ms is worth the effort. The Shopzilla talk does go in that direction, but then 7 seconds is a really awful page load time.
Steve Souders [28 July 2009 12:01 PM]
I just blogged ( http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/07/27/wikia-fast-pages-retain-users/ ) about another stat from Wikia - exit rate drops from 15% for a 2 second page to 10% for a 1 second page.
kévin [24 August 2009 12:29 AM]
Is Dave Artz video presentation available anywhere ? Slides are great but still there is something missing :)
Chris [29 March 2011 06:38 AM]
Man, I would love to be the company that improved their site from 7 seconds to 2.
I think a problem a lot of people have, when using shared hosting, is getting that optimisation to work effectively.
Would love to get my blog below 1.5 seconds!
Scout [ 6 May 2011 04:35 PM]
Internet gains speed every year...how much big contents have to be on a site in order to slow it down to 7 seconds?
It should be easy to improve the speed of a site which needs 7 seconds to load!