Time Is Money

Introduction

If you know me, or if you’ve ever attended one of my talks or read any of my articles or blog posts (oh, so many blog posts!), then you know I’m fascinated by the impact of web performance on human behavior. (For the purposes of this book, let’s use this simple definition of web performance: the speed and availability of web pages.) Because of the space in which I work, most of this human behavior gets correlated to business metrics. For the past six years, I’ve been corralling and writing about every case study I can get my hands on that documents this correlation.

In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that I should finally sit down and pull all these stories under one roof. I’m excited to bring these stories to you and hopefully make you a performance convert, if you aren’t one already.

Why Should Anyone Care About Web Performance?

Maybe you don’t care about performance (yet). But chances are, no matter what kind of site you run—from retail to media to SaaS—you care about one or more of these metrics:

• Bounce rate

• Cart size

• Conversions

• Revenue

• Time on site

• Page views

• User satisfaction

• User retention

• Organic search traffic

• Brand perception

• Productivity

• Bandwidth/CDN savings

Are you targeting at least one of these metrics? Then you should also care about performance.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that, if you can name a business metric, then you can map it to web performance in some quantifiable way. I have yet to find a metric ...