This is really just meant to be decent content, not a sales pitch. We obviously want to grow our business so we write about stuff that's close to what we do. Most people are really uninformed about site performance (still), you'd be shocked how many people don't even know about the 10 year old studies.
Also note, Amazon's -1% per 100ms of latency holds up for the ecommerce companies I've worked with. It's not a small number for any company, and we're actually really cheap for companies with a high value per user (like ecommerce! or saas!). You probably wouldn't serve billions of page views through fly with very cheap ads, though.
That said, I pretty much agree with you. We'll only succeed if we can keep proving that we're valuable. It's part of why we give enough traffic away for free that you can legitimately test us out. I don't particularly want people using us if they don't get any value out of it.
About 5 years ago, I undertook a significant web performance effort on an IR top 100 e-commerce property. We sped the site up significantly and, being the good data nerds that we were, split-ran the hell out of it and found a zero-point-zero (sub-noise) difference in average session value, conversion rate, and average order value.
Believing those then 5-year old studies, we went in the opposite direction and intentionally slowed the site down in multi-variate testing. Out to 1000ms of intentional slowdown per dynamic page, we saw zero-point-zero change in ASV, CR%, and AOV.
We kept the faster experience, because "hey, why not?" and we'd paid all the NRE for it anyway, but the project was a technical success but a big bust versus business case.
That's really fascinating! What about things like Google ranking that's supposedly also affected by page speed? (Or maybe it's not? I have a very limited SEO knowledge)
Agreed (naturally), but also be aware that the relationship may not be linear. There is quite possibly a "knee" in the curve where faster than some threshold will all be the same.
However, it's a quite easy test to run, so may be worth doing even if you can't stake your life on the results applying to a hypothetical speedup.
You don't mention the name of the company, but may I ask whether they were selling goods in the same price range?
I am asking because I can imagine that people who are looking for a $5 item are more inclined to abort the search if it feels to slow while I assume someone looking to buy a $1000 item will persist.
It was vistaprint, so item pricing is similar ($5-50 typically). The confounding issue is that because everything we sell is customized by our customers, they may be less sensitive to small differences in page speed. (If it takes 15.5 minutes instead of 15 minutes to design a business card end-to-end, maybe that matters less than a web or product search.) This was also 5-years ago, so our mobile experience was very much limited to order/account inquiry and everything else we steered you heavily back to desktop.
Our analysis (for this project) was also limited to session and repeat session analysis, so we would have excluded any effects related to long-run increases in sessions from distinct shoppers (organic search traffic increase or cross-shopper recommendations). I believe those were small enough to properly ignore.
I'm definitely not arguing that page speed is bad, but do question the gospel that every 100ms is worth X% more traffic and conversions.
That was the problem I had with this article as well. I've seen some of this stuff before, but I kept expecting to run into a graph showing various delays versus revenue on an e-commerce site. I just assumed it had been measured.
Instead when it came to revenue it was all implied (more people will stay on your site, they'll browse more pages, etc.) or an old statistic from someone else.
This is really just meant to be decent content, not a sales pitch. We obviously want to grow our business so we write about stuff that's close to what we do. Most people are really uninformed about site performance (still), you'd be shocked how many people don't even know about the 10 year old studies.
Also note, Amazon's -1% per 100ms of latency holds up for the ecommerce companies I've worked with. It's not a small number for any company, and we're actually really cheap for companies with a high value per user (like ecommerce! or saas!). You probably wouldn't serve billions of page views through fly with very cheap ads, though.
That said, I pretty much agree with you. We'll only succeed if we can keep proving that we're valuable. It's part of why we give enough traffic away for free that you can legitimately test us out. I don't particularly want people using us if they don't get any value out of it.