Is It True, Faster Sites Sell More Stuff?

bigstartups.com

15 points·bigstartups··4 comments

If you are comparing apples to oranges, then obviously any answer doesn't make sense. But between two sites that sell the same thing that is equally in demand, isn't it obvious that the faster site would sell more of the thing?

Also possibly there is no point in worrying about the faster aspect until you have managed to do the selling -- which from what I hear is hard! Focus...ignore peripheral issues.

All things being equal, a well designed fast site = increased conversians and more orders vs. a well designed slow site. We have seen it first hand, and it has nothing at all to do with the ability of a sight to take in more orders.

It is entirely a question of perception. Having launched a commerce site, and monitored the heat maps and conversion rates closely, I have seen it first hand. A snappy site gives the customer the impression that we are professional and know what we are doing. This increases their confidence in our company, and the likelihood that they will buy our product. When we had performance issues, we watched conversion rates drop. Doing something as simple as asynchronous loading of javascript for our job calculator (on a commercial printing site), had an immediate effect on conversions and revenue.

So, yes, faster sites definitely sell more stuff.

You can use FireFox with the FireBug extension to get what part is slower. You can do it by using the "Net" table or add-in the YSlow.

Aye. Webkit's Inspector coupled with the SpeedTracer Extension for Chrome will give you even more information, and very powerful controls of filtering that information, which is the whole point, really.

And speeding up a web-site/app that is slow is always harder than building one that is fast, so better delegate that task to a pro.

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