The Most Important Website Feature: Performance

Are you treating Performance as a feature? Here’s why you should:

After 3 seconds: 57% of online consumers will abandon your site and 80% will not return. Of these, 30% will tell others about their bad experience.

Source:  Source: “Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance” study conducted by PhoCusWright and Akamai
Note 1: Yes this was specifically for “travel” sites, but I think it’s safe to extrapolate.
Note 2: This was 3 YEARS ago, it’s also safe to assume users are becoming MORE impatient as access to higher broadband networks.

Still not convinced? Did you know Google uses site speed in its ranking algorithm?
From Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:

Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times. Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.

Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let’s Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

More Tools for Measuring Performance:

Infographics: 

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