I find it difficult to believe that sales would be affected by a latency drop less than one tenth of a second.
How did you isolate the variables?
How did you isolate the variables?
But it makes sense, too: if the metric here is average latency, that doesn't mean that some users didn't see a much more dramatic increase. Every tiny bit of frustration removed from the experience adds up.
You've measured and know that a user seeing a 905ms load time converts more than one seeing 915ms?
This is easily possible if you have a highly distributed customer base, and/or some small segment of your customers don't have good upstream peering with your provider.
Which is why I asked the question in the way that I did. I buy that a slimmed down webpage loading 10 ms faster on average will increase conversions because that makes the site usable for the visitors on bad connections. Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board.
I think this is where we disagree. I've seen (firsthand and through analytics) situations where using a CDN can dramatically improve response time in a small subset of customers (while also getting the across the board win for most customers).
I've also seen CDNs (Amazon's in the early days) that were signficantly slower than direct to linode, even with a warm cache. It's a weird world, and packet routing is hard.
Also, latency measured at the server is amplified once its received by the browser. And when the user's connection isn't great, all this is worsened. It quickly adds up. In fact, it doesn't "adds" up, it "multiplies" up.