Torbit Moves Towards Free To Help Web Businesses Turn Speed Into Revenue | Hacker News Reader

Torbit Moves Towards Free To Help Web Businesses Turn Speed Into Revenue

techcrunch.com

17 pointsjoshfraser7 comments

Congratulations to Josh, Jon and the Torbit crew, impressive set of customers. Love the Slideshare embedded in the article.

Thanks Cameron. We're hoping to share more data in the future.

That's an interesting powerpoint at the bottom of the techcrunch article.

I see your argument that slower page loads leads to less engagement and higher bounce rates, and I'm somewhat skeptical - how do you know that your data isn't saying that more engaging websites are faster because they're more engaging?

If being engaging is correlated with delivering more value, they're likely more profitable and more able to invest in higher quality engineering & infrastructure than other sites. This would likely lead to decreased load times. In other words, how do you know the cause from the effect?

I think the only way to make the argument you're trying to make is to compare each website with itself when loaded slower.

Sure, correlation does not imply causation. I think most of our customers are smart enough to understand that.

The engagement charts are typically broken down for each site so that they are compared with themselves. It turns out, in both cases there is a strong correlation between performance and the business metrics you care about (bounce rate, conversion, time on site, # pages viewed, etc).

I thought one of the last sentences was pretty interesting. I've definitely been noticing more websites with larger images - Square, Desk.com, etc. I'd love to know how that's affecting these websites and if it's worth it in those instances to give up speed for the marketing advantages that higher quality images give.

What's the difference between your site optimizer and cloudflare's optimization?

I can't speak for Cloudflare, but I can tell you a few of the things we've done to make Site Optimizer awesome. A big differentiator for us is our focus on browser-specific optimizations. For example, if you visit a page in Chrome we'll swap out the images for WebP versions. WebP is about half the size of JPEG but looks just as good. We've also developed a lot of cutting edge optimizations for mobile that are unique to Torbit. We're also able to leverage the data we get from Insight to make our Site Optimization service better as well.

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