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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Google: 2006.

Amazon: 2006.

Akamai: 2009.

At least the Optimizely result is from this year.

I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it.

Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old?

Do people have more such studies?

(Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results. Figures like “three seconds to abandonment” are absurd when you’re in Australia or India as I am. Most e-commerce sites—especially US/international ones—haven’t even started drawing at that point, even with the best Internet connectivity and computer performance available, simply because of latency if the site is hosted in the US only. I visited the US a couple of years ago and was amazed at just how fast the Internet was, simply due to reduced latency.)

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> I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it.

> Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old?

Could you explain why? New data is good, sure but why should we disregard old data? I think instead of asking for people to simply discard old data, you should point out the issues you believe the data has so that they can be addressed (with newer data if necessary).

Anyhow, from https://riteproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/fact-sheet.p...:

- "In 2008 the Aberdeen Group found that a 1-second delay in page load time costs 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% decrease in searches that result in new customers."

- In 2009 Microsoft Bing found that introducing 500ms extra delay translated to 1.2% less advertising revenue.

I also found a whitepaper from 2010 done by Gomez.com that shows how speed impacts various metrics: https://github.com/JasonPaulGardner/po4ux/blob/master/InfoPa...

There's also an article from 2013 that's only loosely related but shows that reducing TTFB latency can increase search result rankings: https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-sear...

> Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results.

I'd love these too, let me know if you find them.

The situation has changed. The nature of people’s consumption of the Web is different now, especially with the take-up of mobile browsing in the last couple of years. (The change in the nature of consumption on that count in particular is why I would like to see results from the last year, especially if they’re segmented by device.)

People depend on the web more than they did, so they might be willing to wait for things longer—or even just be resigned to the web being slow. Or perhaps the increased number of providers means that they won’t be willing to wait as long. I don’t know.

It does seem to me that the precious few studies that there are from recent times haven’t shown as severe a drop-off as ones from ten years ago did. But then the ranges of the results are so far out of my experience in non-US countries that I don’t feel I can judge it.

What I do know is that I have had people complain of the age of the data I cited within the last couple of years, when citing the traditional examples of Amazon and Google. Their age and the indubitable ecosystem changes since their time make me a little leery of citing them now, because after due thought, I agree with the objections.

As I say, I want performance to be a commercially valuable factor, because it would justify one of my favourite two topics in IT. I just want us to be using solid, dependable studies of the matter so that we can prove our point without reasonable doubt, and justify expenditure on improving performance, rather than aged studies which are open to quibble.

> People depend on the web more than they did, so they might be willing to wait for things longer—or even just be resigned to the web being slow. Or perhaps the increased number of providers means that they won’t be willing to wait as long. I don’t know.

It is hard for me to disregard those big names and their claims, especially since I have no direct experience in working for any of those companies for me to say otherwise.

On the other hand, in my purely anecdotal world of friends, family, and colleagues, I have never seen/heard of such behaviors. I doubt any of them even realize what 100ms is, let alone abandon their purchase on Amazon because of that delay. Most people can't even react in 100ms to brake their cars.

I really have to wonder if we have causation vs correlation going on.

I think citing data before the wide spread uptake on mobile is non-representative of the modern use of the web.

But it's probably very reasonable to believe that people's expectations of a faster response time has only risen since 10 years ago.

If I had to make a guess whether the same studies performed 10 years ago were performed today, whether the drop in page views would increase or decrease with slower response time, Id guess that today you'd have even fewer page views than 10 years ago.

I don’t believe it’s reasonable to assume that, having presented an alternative view that I find plausible in other comments in this thread. I hope that people’s expectations have increased, but I don’t believe it’s a reasonable assumption.

We need data.

There is lots of recent data out there. The general trend is that those findings from the mid 2000s hold even more true today. People are much more sensitive to latency, while the problem has gotten harder due to last mile flowing through congested air. https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/articles/mobile-speed-ma...

The entire premise of Google AMP and Facebook's Instant Articles is predicated on performance. Speed matters.

Why would you expect that visitors became more accepting of slower websites?

If anything I would imagine to be the opposite with connections generally being faster these days. Especially since old Google's result was about observed effects of 100ms slowdown so not about generally slow websites.

I’m not trying to say it will go one way or another—just that the variables in the equation have all changed (expectations, the nature of access to the Internet, ubiquity, &c.), so results from several years ago are obsolete (I’d even call results from over a year ago obsolescent) and we need new figures for credibility.

People don’t necessarily become more demanding; maybe in the earlier days they said, “I don’t need this, it’s taking too long, I’ll just give up,” whereas now they are resigned to the Internet being slow.

Also of interest would be making a site massively faster (e.g. by an apposite service worker implementation), but A/B test on the rollout of it. Over several months, ideally.

My personal mental model is this:

People have a threshold to to [1] on how long they stay on your site, say 5 minutes. If you're site is faster, they will see more pages. More pages increases the likelihood that they find something to buy/comment/...

[1] would love this tested.

I tested the impact of page speed on ads about 3 years ago. The CTR impact was pretty dramatic - I can't recall the exact numbers but they were in the order of 50% CTR drop with 500ms delay.

That's obviously specific to ads, but there's clearly still some impact from page speed there.

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