However, I am curious about the research showing that users will leave a website after 3 seconds. Where was this measured? On desktop, or on a low-end/low-bandwidth device? With low-end devices and/or low bandwidth, most websites will load slowly, and my guess is that performance expectations will be different than on desktop.
There's an option to download the full study but it requires registering.
You do what too? Conflating correlation with causation? We all do that at one point or another :) Speed is no doubt important but it's only a part of the big picture. The site I'm maintaining has roughly 60% bounce rate. If I'm to take the "study" at face value, that means all of those bounces are due to 3+ sec load time. And if I somehow manage to bring that to 0.1 sec (preferably using Akamai's services), the bounce rate will magically go to 0%. Of course, that doesn't happen in the real world.
Btw, great article, thanks for taking the time to write it.