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At one of my recent jobs (EU-wide consumer healtech) we managed to reduce bounce rate by addressing a number of issues indicated by DevTools, mostly focusing on

At one of my recent jobs (EU-wide consumer healtech) we managed to reduce bounce rate by addressing a number of issues indicated by DevTools, mostly focusing on time to render and time to interact. It indeed positively impacted conversion and I guess this is a common knowledge among marketing teams by now, that this works.

onion2k 4y ago
I think it's fairly obvious that a faster website is better. I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile. If you're in the bottom half of websites then you're giving up money and you need to improve. If you're in the top half, or top quarter, or whatever then maybe that engineering effort could be used to generate more revenue in more effective ways than just cranking up perf. You could probably improve speed forever and always see a measurable improvement, but if that's costing more than you're seeing in added conversions, or you're doing it instead of improving features that would net a greater return, then you're doing the wrong thing.
- ivan_gammel 4y ago
  >What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile. There's indeed a point where optimizations stop yielding meaningful results, but it is certainly not connected to the performance of competitor websites. As soon as an user lands on your website, only its own performance and accessibility matters and positive ROI can still be achieved well beyond the point when your start doing better than competition. Where did you get this idea about competing websites from?
  - fendy3002 4y ago
    Not competing website but other average website in general. Say that averagely HN load for 1000ms and it's positioned around top 15% fastest. And if your website load for 1100 ~ 1200ms will be okay. OP's point is, if you're able to speed up to range of 800 ~ 900ms it may not resulting in much higher conversion. However if your site is at 1800ms range it's worthwhile to increase to 1200ms range
    - ivan_gammel 4y ago
      I don't think that it works this way. If bounce rate matters for you, because your website is part of sales conversion funnel, then you do not benchmark against random "average" website like HN, because you do not build your site the same way, your audience is likely different from many different angles and you cannot really measure the response time under representative conditions (because you likely do not know them). The only sensible benchmark you can have is the performance of your own website. It makes sense to collect some low hanging fruits, but further optimizations generally make sense when you have enough traffic to reach statistic significance in A/B tests. And those tests will not always result in more optimized version, because content matters too and better content may outperform faster version in terms of conversion, so it will often be two steps forward and one step back.

onion2k 4y ago

I think it's fairly obvious that a faster website is better. I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile. If you're in the bottom half of websites then you're giving up money and you need to improve. If you're in the top half, or top quarter, or whatever then maybe that engineering effort could be used to generate more revenue in more effective ways than just cranking up perf. You could probably improve speed forever and always see a measurable improvement, but if that's costing more than you're seeing in added conversions, or you're doing it instead of improving features that would net a greater return, then you're doing the wrong thing.

ivan_gammel 4y ago
>What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile. There's indeed a point where optimizations stop yielding meaningful results, but it is certainly not connected to the performance of competitor websites. As soon as an user lands on your website, only its own performance and accessibility matters and positive ROI can still be achieved well beyond the point when your start doing better than competition. Where did you get this idea about competing websites from?
- fendy3002 4y ago
  Not competing website but other average website in general. Say that averagely HN load for 1000ms and it's positioned around top 15% fastest. And if your website load for 1100 ~ 1200ms will be okay. OP's point is, if you're able to speed up to range of 800 ~ 900ms it may not resulting in much higher conversion. However if your site is at 1800ms range it's worthwhile to increase to 1200ms range
  - ivan_gammel 4y ago
    I don't think that it works this way. If bounce rate matters for you, because your website is part of sales conversion funnel, then you do not benchmark against random "average" website like HN, because you do not build your site the same way, your audience is likely different from many different angles and you cannot really measure the response time under representative conditions (because you likely do not know them). The only sensible benchmark you can have is the performance of your own website. It makes sense to collect some low hanging fruits, but further optimizations generally make sense when you have enough traffic to reach statistic significance in A/B tests. And those tests will not always result in more optimized version, because content matters too and better content may outperform faster version in terms of conversion, so it will often be two steps forward and one step back.