4 ms·

I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients

by soared 9y ago

I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so can easily switch to a similar website. I do think this test could have been done without banner ads involved. Looking at page load speed per user and how that effects traffic would likely have the same results. From my link below: > A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. [1] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

gwern 9y ago
I'm aware of those results, but I assumed that they weren't an issue because I was using the best-practices 'async'/background loading AdSense JS snippets. The ads never block the rendering or loading of the rest of the page, they pop in a second or two later.
mattmanser 9y ago
In my experience that kissmetrics blog is a load of nonsense in practice. We massively reduced load time on the all the key pages from 4 secs to roughly <400 ms avg. No 25% bump in sales for us. At the time the client sold about 50-80 things a day on thousands of daily visits. A month later, they sold about 50-80 things a day. This was a fairly standard website similar to booking.com or any search/book site, basically location aware searches with a landing page for each venue and a "book" CTA. I did a similar thing with their mobile site a year or two later, massively reducing the page-weight and reducing loading times on the devices I tested from seconds to again sub-second load times. Again no discernible bump.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Did you try to see what happened if you increase the load time above 4 seconds?
- icelancer 9y ago
  Right - the pageload time only matters for certain sectors. We sell sports science equipment and our competitors have 10s load times; I'm sure they have no issue selling their stuff. If they got their load times down to ~1s I bet they'd sell more... but not that much more. We are in the 1.5s-2.0s load time and I'm happy with that; given we use Woocommerce to drive our traffic I highly, highly doubt I can get it much lower given our current site design which does very well engagement-wise. That's fine for us; our conversion metrics and related analytics show that we're doing very well for our industry. For niche equipment you're either gonna buy it or you aren't. If it isn't Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart, or places where you are preying on impulse buys (Woot, LowEndBox/VPS, etc), then the page load times matter a hell of a lot less than something like user design.
- austinhutch 9y ago
  These kinds of stories don't get made into blog posts because they don't help sell any kind of narrative. Novice eCommerce store owners will focus on the "top 10 things you can do to increase conversion" from blogs like the one mentioned above. At a large scale page load time would have a discernible impact on your bottom line, but for most it is a premature optimization (as long as you aren't trying to deliver 10mb webpages).
- bertil 9y ago
  I am wondering how much of that lack of sensitivity could be due to having two types of visitors: - people who know what they want, know this is not ads or JavaScript and have an anti-advertising or anti-scripting tool; when KissMetric ran their experiment, those tools were not widely available and those visitors went elsewhere at the time; - people who don’t know and enjoy the browsing and don’t mind the delay; didn’t then, don’t now and have kept on using your competitors’ website.
- pakitan 9y ago
  I have a similar experience - after a redesign and significant improvement of page load time, the bounce rate and few other metrics improved but conversion rate stayed almost exactly the same. Kissmetrics are probably measuring this across thousands of sites and averaging the results as opposed to taking a slow site and tracking conversion rate after it gets speedier. So, it could be a correlation kind of thing - better sites, with more resources, simply invest more into every aspect of the business, including site speed.

by soared 9y ago

gwern 9y ago

I'm aware of those results, but I assumed that they weren't an issue because I was using the best-practices 'async'/background loading AdSense JS snippets. The ads never block the rendering or loading of the rest of the page, they pop in a second or two later.

mattmanser 9y ago

In my experience that kissmetrics blog is a load of nonsense in practice. We massively reduced load time on the all the key pages from 4 secs to roughly <400 ms avg. No 25% bump in sales for us. At the time the client sold about 50-80 things a day on thousands of daily visits. A month later, they sold about 50-80 things a day. This was a fairly standard website similar to booking.com or any search/book site, basically location aware searches with a landing page for each venue and a "book" CTA. I did a similar thing with their mobile site a year or two later, massively reducing the page-weight and reducing loading times on the devices I tested from seconds to again sub-second load times. Again no discernible bump.

danieltillett 9y ago
Did you try to see what happened if you increase the load time above 4 seconds?
icelancer 9y ago
Right - the pageload time only matters for certain sectors. We sell sports science equipment and our competitors have 10s load times; I'm sure they have no issue selling their stuff. If they got their load times down to ~1s I bet they'd sell more... but not that much more. We are in the 1.5s-2.0s load time and I'm happy with that; given we use Woocommerce to drive our traffic I highly, highly doubt I can get it much lower given our current site design which does very well engagement-wise. That's fine for us; our conversion metrics and related analytics show that we're doing very well for our industry. For niche equipment you're either gonna buy it or you aren't. If it isn't Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart, or places where you are preying on impulse buys (Woot, LowEndBox/VPS, etc), then the page load times matter a hell of a lot less than something like user design.
austinhutch 9y ago
These kinds of stories don't get made into blog posts because they don't help sell any kind of narrative. Novice eCommerce store owners will focus on the "top 10 things you can do to increase conversion" from blogs like the one mentioned above. At a large scale page load time would have a discernible impact on your bottom line, but for most it is a premature optimization (as long as you aren't trying to deliver 10mb webpages).
bertil 9y ago
I am wondering how much of that lack of sensitivity could be due to having two types of visitors: - people who know what they want, know this is not ads or JavaScript and have an anti-advertising or anti-scripting tool; when KissMetric ran their experiment, those tools were not widely available and those visitors went elsewhere at the time; - people who don’t know and enjoy the browsing and don’t mind the delay; didn’t then, don’t now and have kept on using your competitors’ website.
pakitan 9y ago
I have a similar experience - after a redesign and significant improvement of page load time, the bounce rate and few other metrics improved but conversion rate stayed almost exactly the same. Kissmetrics are probably measuring this across thousands of sites and averaging the results as opposed to taking a slow site and tracking conversion rate after it gets speedier. So, it could be a correlation kind of thing - better sites, with more resources, simply invest more into every aspect of the business, including site speed.