Time Is Money

Chapter 3. Measuring Performance from Within

So far, we’ve focused on the monetary benefits of improving web performance for customers. In this chapter, let’s switch gears and discuss the value of performance optimization using inward-facing metrics.

A 2008 study by researchers at Aberdeen Group¹ found that application performance issues could hurt overall corporate revenues by up to 9%. These findings don’t just apply to KPIs such as conversions and revenues. Poor application performance can hurt companies in a myriad of other ways, including:

• Collaboration and information sharing

• Task completion

• Customer service (order management, customer records, problem resolution, call center efficiency, etc.)

• Adoption rate for internal applications

• Datacenter infrastructure costs

• Bandwidth costs

In this chapter, we’ll discuss each of these alongside real-world stories that show how companies correlated performance improvements to internal metrics.

I really believe that if we’re to going to continue to recruit people to contribute to the pages, it really needs to give people that user experience. It needs to not just be fast, but delightfully fast.

Ori Livneh, Principal Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation

Employee Satisfaction

[Frontend optimization] significantly improves the speed of our application, which not only increases employee productivity, but does wonders for our bottom line.

Alan Ruth, Senior Director, Enterprise Applications, Graebel

Have you ever wondered ...