“That’s why [performance] is important and why we should be obsessed and not be discouraged when it doesn’t change the funnel. My theory here is when an interface is faster, you feel good. And ultimately what that comes down to is you feel in control. The web app isn’t controlling me, I’m controlling it. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”
—Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress
The year was 1999 and 99 percent of all internet users in the U.S. were still on dial-up connections. PCs had a whopping 233Kbps of processing, and rich media content was the size of a postage stamp. Google had 100,000 searches a day, far less than the more than 100 million they see today. The biggest concerns at that time in building an online business were page load times and credit card billing. Many hosting companies did not take adult content; outside of adult, no one charged for content.
Over the next few years, consumer adoption of broadband exploded. Those who were once paying very little for internet proved to be very willing to pay four or five times as much to have faster speeds. Meanwhile, Intel and AMD began to wage their own war on slower computing. We found ourselves buying PCs that had processing speeds 10 times faster than what we had been previously using. The bar was raised again and again until the term “user experience” was matched with “consumer expectations.”
Today’s online users want their internet experience to work as fast as one would turn a page in a book or change the channel on the television set. In order to compete with traditional media sources, the online experience had to match the convenience of traditional media devices such as TV, radio and books. It had to allow consumers the same ease of use and, more importantly, the same speeds they experienced when channel surfing.
We are a society that has convinced ourselves that we don’t have time to wait and have grown intolerant of anyone who can’t give us instant gratification. Speed has become the differentiator between success and failure, and anyone who can’t match those expectations will surely lose out in a competitive business model.
Until recently, however, discussions among internet marketers focused more on providing access to a wide variety of content, rather than delivery speeds. Getting the right content to the right user had become the focus, and ease of use became paramount in the eyes of most net business. Because speeds on the internet had increased greatly, few regarded delivery speeds as an issue anymore. It was assumed that a few seconds or more of load time made very little difference as long as consumers were getting the content they wanted.
Several years ago, however, the major players in the online market—Google, Microsoft and AOL—began to look at delivery speeds with finely tuned scrutiny. Independently, company researchers conducted tests by isolating groups of users and changing their delivery speeds while watching closely how those speeds affected their use. In 2009 these researchers met collectively in San Jose and reported their finding at the Velocity Conference.
Google degraded its user experience by slowing down load times by 0.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds, resulting in a decrease in revenues by as much as 25 percent. Given the fact that Google revenues top $10 billion annually, the study suggested that a very small decrease in load times would have cost Google $2.5 billion a year. Even more, testing showed that after the delay was removed, the users still had -0.21 percent fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affects long-term behavior.
Microsoft found similar results with testing on Bing. However, the Microsoft study uncovered another interesting point: slower load speeds further accelerated delays. The study also measured a significantly higher abandonment rate, where more users did not click to any results from a search query. The same searches with the same results at slower return times saw fewer people clicking on the results. At a .5-second delay, users took 1.2 seconds to respond after the object loaded; at a 2-second delay, they took 3.1 seconds. One would think that the delay to click would be the same regardless of when the object appeared, but researchers found that in fact it increased.
Shopzilla took the study in a slightly different direction. Programmers made a goal to reduce the page load times and launched a yearlong initiative to do so. Their goal was to reduce their average page load time from 7 seconds to 2 seconds. In the end, this resulted in a 25 percent increase in page views and a 7 percent to 12 percent increase in revenues.
Optimizing for your users is not necessarily a difficult task. But it does require an ongoing commitment and entails some work if you have never considered this as an important part of your profit center. Larger web companies now have entire performance departments whose sole function is to manage and oversee optimization policy. To successfully engage in this initiative, you must also make speed concerns an integral part of your practices for all development.
There are many ways that online businesses can address speed issues, including these:
• Employ progressive rendering.
• Use image sprites instead of full images.
• Build in multiple tables instead of placing everything in just one.
• Get something to the user quickly, such as the header, while they wait for the rest to load.
• Avoid rounded corners that require more images and stick to square graphics.
• Don’t load cookies in the header. Instead, script the cookies and load them later in the page after the header has loaded.
• Avoid slow code such as Java or make sure any Java loads in unison with the CSS scripts.
• Watch for unused CSS rules that are no longer needed.
• Globally optimize delivery.
• Use the tools available to you such as YSlow.
The site Developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html is a good place to start when you are ready to optimize.
In the end, consider the uniqueness of our industry and the catharsis of our consumers’ buying decisions. Immediate gratification is the paramount motivation; assuming our content is so profound that our users are willing to wait is a flawed notion. Some may wait, but most won’t. Moreover, why alienate those who won’t wait for the few who will?
Optimizing for the web has a clear and direct effect of optimizing your income, and it needs to be clearly analyzed and planned for if you wish to capture those revenues that are now left on the table. As competition in the market increases, so does the need to differentiate your business from the millions of others out there today. While you should consider all options that affect your business model, the consumer experience will be the final indicator in your path to success. Consumer reaction to your efforts can be gauged by looking at your bank account after you have optimized that experience.
Randall Crockett is an adult markets specialist who is an expert in content delivery, management and protection. A former senior vice president of CCBill’s DRMNetworks, he now works with with Limelight Networks. He can be reached at (602) 850-4847 or [email protected]. This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of AVN.
