Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

From a "Why, who cares" perspective website (and app) speed are highly correlated with conversion and engagement.

Google's headline research on the subject says "Improving your load time by 0.1s can boost conversion rates by 8%."

Some add'l data, sourced by Neilsen Group below:

- Google found that increasing the load time of its SERPs by half a second resulted in a 20% higher bounce rate.

- Google found 53% of mobile visits ended if a page took longer than 3 seconds to load.

- Akamai aggregated data from 17 retailers (7 billion pageviews) and found that conversion rates were highest for pages that loaded in less than 2 seconds; longer load times correlated with 50% drops in conversion rates and increased bounce rates, especially for mobile visitors.

- BBC found that for every extra second of page load time, 10% of users will leave.

Want to sell / fix this?

Here's the best three simple resource illustrating objective third party results from increasing site speed:

- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page-load-time-conversion...

- https://wpostats.com/

- https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/more/website...

Here is a more compelling deeper look from a leader in the UX space:

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/

Here's a really well written article about how to PROVE to the powers that be that site speed is worth testing:

https://web.dev/site-speed-and-business-metrics/

I used to work for a major e-commerce company and will back this up. The importance of performance, of course, depends on the use case.

In e-commerce, the biggest factors (that come to mind) to compete on are—SEO and brand aside—price, offerings, and convenience. Convenience has two dimensions: UX and performance.

If a user has a very clear idea of what they want from your site, they'll probably be patient. If a user is channel surfing (and the vast majority are when it comes to shopping, comparing options, etc.), then every millisecond matters. Every millisecond spent loading is a millisecond not spent selling/convincing.

So what you're saying is, the fact that I feel icky and decide against spending any money on HomeDepot.com lately, is hardly a surprise.

I totally believe that the vast majority of page views are from channel surfing (or bots), but have a hard time believing that has any correlation to actual purchases.

If I'm spending an hour's pay on something I really want, of course I'll wait 10 seconds for the page to load, or if I can't get it to load at all, I'll make a note to try again later from different browser or internet connection. I'll manually enter my address details if they didn't auto-fill properly. I'll respond to emails on what I want to declare for customs, and various other efforts.

I, and people I know, feel like we buy very little on a whim. Is that unique? Are there whales who buy everything you can put in front of their face, or a different demographic who searches for something to buy and then changes their mind in precisely 850 milliseconds?

I would accept that like candy in the checkout lane, the profit is small but worth more than the extra effort it takes to put the offering there, but the revenue is small compared to the actual stuff people need to buy, but the analytics that suggest that hundreds of people click a link to your page but most close it faster than you can read the headline just seem unbelievable.

Maybe it's people who know kind of what they want, but not exactly. Let's say you want a vacuum cleaner you go to a few different websites and check about 20 models on each site. One one site every time you check a model you have to wait 10 seconds. You might give up early on that site.

> Are there whales who buy everything you can put in front of their face, or a different demographic who searches for something to buy and then changes their mind in precisely 850 milliseconds?

Maybe, maybe not, but site load time has a very well documented correlation with bounce rate. And if a user bounces, they're obviously not going to end up spending money.

I believe it's more about keeping the user in a sort of sales/marketing 'funnel'. If I'm just browsing and come across a service I might be vaguely interested in, perhaps I'll click the link to view their page. Now I'm at the top of the funnel. With each link I have to click to follow, there is an opportunity for me to get bored, get distracted by something else, or so on. Maybe I'm not buying anything then, but maybe somewhere along the funnel is a free trial of the service, and if I'm in a pleasant mood, maybe I'll do the trial. But if I bounced because of a 5 sec load time, chances are good the mildly impulsive mood I was in is not going to persist enough to encourage a subsequent visit.

So it might not be an immediate thing, but better engagement does lead to more sales. I like to consider myself a mindful shopper, but there are definitely a handful of $5/month services I am subbed to because I was in a vaguely impulsive mood and stumbled into something I thought might be useful -- and their signup process was silky smooth.

And if you are instead shopping for an item and browsing several different sites, if one of them sticks out because of its slow load times, that's a tab you are going to close.

Probably lots of people who are like the stories about women shopping. They go around looking at lots of different things they don't need to see if they find something but mostly don't buy. The more items they browse the more likely they are to find something they want and buy it.

>If I'm spending an hour's pay on something I really want, of course I'll wait 10 seconds for the page to load

When I go to ebay I end up on the landing page. Then I have to enter my product name into the search. Then I will go into search settings and filter out auctions (if I want to order immediately). Then I have to open 3-4 different product listings. That's around 6 page loads. If each page takes 10 seconds then I would have to spend 1 minute doing nothing but waiting for the site to load.

> or if I can't get it to load at all, I'll make a note to try again later from different browser or internet connection.

Isn't it far more likely you are going to buy whatever you want from somewhere else?

>I, and people I know, feel like we buy very little on a whim. Is that unique? Are there whales who buy everything you can put in front of their face, or a different demographic who searches for something to buy and then changes their mind in precisely 850 milliseconds?

It's not about buying. It's about which store you visit when buying something. If your site performs poorly then users might not come to your online store. They may go to a competitor.

The thing about those averages is that they are quite unintuitive. Remember they are averaged over thousands or millions of users. There will always be some users with latency spikes because their device is much slower than usual or simply because servers are running at capacity. They are in the minority and have small effects on average metrics but the latency they see could be very high, maybe even up to 5 times the average. If you can decrease average latency by 1 second then the site might be 5 seconds faster for a minority of users.

>I would accept that like candy in the checkout lane, the profit is small but worth more than the extra effort it takes to put the offering there, but the revenue is small compared to the actual stuff people need to buy

You have to consider that each product listing on an online store is basically an ad. You are not necessarily buying all the products you see but each product listing informs you about what's available in the market place. If pages load faster you end up seeing more "ads" which increases the likely hood that you eventually do buy something.

Those studies all come from companies trying to sell you something.

They seemed to come from when mobile phones were much slower when there was a valid use for AMP pages. A/B test data is very easy to cherry pick from and you can see a 10% increase in conversation based on random chance. I can see my marketing team misinterpret data like that and use it for promotion. I am skeptical.

I improved the initial loading speed of a website so it was 30% faster on an old mobile phone and it made no difference in conversation based on the analytics.

Most people used faster phones with faster internet that it really didn't matter. After the first page load, most of the bloated assets were cached so even those with slow connections were relatively fast navigating further.

There could be some types of websites where speed matters more like if you promoted click bait articles with high bounce rates. But if you have high quality content, it isn't going to be that important unless you have really terrible bloat.

Some of these, not all, don't even seem to be A/B tests, just correlation being explained as causality.

"This more streamlined design that also happens to load faster led to higher conversion rates! It must be because it loads faster!"

If nobody cares, why did Google invest so much in amp ?

To take control of other people’s content and, by extension, revenue streams? Performance was a selling point to the web dev - me, as a user of the web, was never even asked my opinion, and I can’t (easily) disable amp.

Alphabet cared. It cared about what corporations can care about, making money. It invested so much because there was a good return on investment and there was a lot of cash on hand wanting for investment and Amp was big enough to make use of enough cash in hand to be worth pursuing. With billions of cash on hand fixed overhead makes small investment not worth the bother. For Alphabet, a hundred million dollars is less than rounding error.

To compete with Facebook in centrally controlling the internet and the revenue that flows through it. It's their Plan B after their Plan A, Google+, failed.

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