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Comment by XCSme | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is an issue with the on-site analytics, but with the quality of the traffic and website performance. If you make sure that:

1) Your site loads in under 3-4 seconds for any user.

2) The user is interested enough to wait 3-4 seconds until the page loads.

Then most issues will be solved.

The problem with ads in many cases is that the traffic they send is of very low quality or just bots. In the end you already know from your ads provider how many users they say they sent and you should always use that when calculating ad conversion rate.

Also note that using Cloudflare will count as bounced users who never actually even tried to load your page (bots, crawlers, scrapers, all HTTP requests).

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It's amazing that 3-4 seconds is considered a reasonable target in 2020 when 8 seconds was a target on freaking dialup. It's like having a Ferrari and considering outrunning a horse a success.

Every time I see an article about the growth of data usage, I thing that data usage in bytes is increasing much, much faster than data usage in terms of end-user utility.

Twitter weighs about a MB, a tweet is at most 280 characters, and typically of negative utility to the user and society. So yes.

No one thinks that's a reasonable target. That's insane. I don't know who that person is or what he's in charge of, but that's the fastest way to being a dead company.

100 ms max on backend processing, 500 ms max on first time to interaction. Client connection speeds matter, obviously. 3-4 seconds is get your fired ass out of here in my world.

What industry sector are you in?

I've worked in both b2b and consumer spaces. Finance, Market Research, Payments, Education, and Real Estate.

Then why the fuck is the average website measured in megabytes

3-4 seconds includes the DNS resolving, downloading HTML, CSS, JS, media, parsing them, creating the DOM, layout, calculating styles, rendering, etc. It's very hard even for a static imageless site to load in under 1 second for low-end mobile device.

That being said, for good UX the target should definitely be under 1 second to interactice, but even on desktop, if your users can't wait 3 seconds after they click the ad, they are not actually interested at all in your product.

People are also used with waiting a bit after they change sites/applications when they initiate the transition, so transition feels faster than it is. It starts feeling slow when you are already on the blank page, having time to look at the loading spinner.

I'm not saying slow is good, but I highly doubt that you can make any site have 500ms TTI for any user (they could easily have 150ms ping to your closest server). I assume that TTI means having access to all website functionality, not some simplified placeholder UI.

If users are used to waiting, it's because people like you have trained them to be. You list all the things that go into rendering a usable UI as though we don't all know that. Users probably don't, and that sounds like a lot. It sounds like the kind of excuse for shitty load times that PMs use when people do complain about slow websites.

And you can doubly tell how much of a PM you are by assuming that everyone is accessing your product by ad and how much you don't care if they are interested after 3-4 seconds. That's a lot of money you're leaving on the table.

Low-end mobile devices are not the right metric for TTI.

Most people don't realize how fast the web can be because they don't bother to benchmark until they are well into the tooling choices and feature development and maybe someone somewhere decides to complain about speed.

A functional Pyramid app with dynamic templates using Mako, and some db queries via SQLAlchemy can fully load in under 100ms.

The bottom line is that speed is a feature. It's not just one feature; it's your most important feature if you want users. It's more important than developer productivity; it's more important than any other feature. You don't know this because you work in a b2b/enterprise space where users don't have a choice. Their managers make the choice. But if you ever work directly on consumer products you'll find this out really quickly. The difference between ~.5 sec TTI and 4 sec TTI is millions of revenue per minute in eCommerce.

But even though it's b2b doesn't mean it has to be bad and suck people's time away from them. You have the option to learn something and change your priorities. But you won't.

Wow, a personal attack based on assumptions.

I just want to say that I'm not a PM and I don't even work in a corporation. I have worked my entire career focusing on performance (learned programming for and during algorithmic contests were every millisecond really matters, made open-source contributions that vastly improved performance, worked in the gaming space where even users care a lot about performance, and working in the analytics space, where I created a high performance, lightweight alternative to some heavy and data demanding alternatives).

I respect your opinion, but my comment was based on experience, knowledge of human behavior and analytics and A/B tests ran on millions of users. I do agree that it might differ from product to product, but in the majority of cases you just get to a point where it is "fast enough", users no longer notice and spending more time on optimizations takes too much effort for the benefits it brings.

Whoever expects a site to load in under 500 ms has only a vague idea about the real world, and probably never tried enabling connection throttling in developer tools.

3-4 sec TTI is to be expected from a fully static, server-rendered website delivered from an AWS CF edge through a realistic sloppy mobile connection.

Even at 5+ sec TTI you will probably have green PageSpeed with rating in the nineties if everything else is good.

To be fair, they said 3-4 s for any user. Hopefully most users will see much better times.

I hope that with "for any user" your parent means something like p99 load times which include people on GPRS connections.

I dont know where you live but in most countries gprs will not be included in p99. The few cases of mobile usage in p99 will be lte and the different 3g connections.

This may be different for mobile apps.

Live in a world where most people connecting to my website dont have reliable internet connections and low quality mobile is actually pretty standard.

The train Wifi in German trains feels like communicating through a tin-can-telephone with the servers as soon as you leave the city.

When doing research on QoE and QoS for page and video loading i remember the upper threshold of QoE being ~100ms, and every 100ms delay would have significant impact on sales. 3-4 seconds would be considered as a joke back then.

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and assume you're a product manager for atlassian.

You nailed it. That is probably the most likely correct conclusion. I mean, it almost must be that way. I do not know of any other "service" (more like disservice really), with so many products, which fails so terribly to get to a minimum standard in usability and page speed. Even the login in Atlassian is f'ed up, and you cannot login with sane ad blocking. I have to create a separate browser profile and start FF with profile manager each time, so that I can choose, all just to keep the Atlassian infection at bay.

I don't know, I find the MS/live/hotmail/office.com/outlook login thingy quite entertaining (will it hop from more servers than the standard ttl TCP packet value ?) ^^

> standard ttl TCP packet value

Nit: TCP doesn't handle TTL, IP does.

To be fair, this is a blight that infects all b2b/enterprise platforms. The devs and PMs don't care about speed because they aren't punished for being slow. They don't value speed as a feature because they don't have to and don't lose customers because of slowness.

These deals are made by people who don't use the software because they passed some checklist of features and security audits, not because they are good.

Consumer websites, blogs, and especially eCommerce websites can't get away with that without losing users almost instantly.

The moral of the story is that if you are already a big, wealthy company with a big reputation, you can afford to be shit. If you aren't, you're making a big mistake with 3-4 sec load times.

I worked with Alexey on this project. It’s pretty straightforward to filter out bots (either before send, or in analysis later). For our traffic, it was mostly commonly known bot user-agents. I’m also pretty sure malicious bots get blocked by Cloudflare before hitting the Cloudflare workers.

When dealing with ads, most "bots" are actually clicks coming from click farms, which are from real devices. I'm not sure what's the best way to filter those though.

Not trying to be provocative here, but I've read on this subject for years and the any time I've seen it measured it points to your assertion here as being deeply deeply wrong. I don't have the energy to gather the links, but pretty much everything written by anyone credible concluded that _milliseconds matter_. Don't take my word for it, though.

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