Why Should We Work on Web Performance?

tldr; It affects conversions. It makes it possible to get your product into low-bandwidth and mobile-only areas. Users get more work done before running out of patience or time. There’s lots of evidence and studies for all of this.

It affects conversions

• 23 Stats on Mobile Web Performance - Soasta
• Web Page Speed Affects Conversions (Infographic) - Web Performance Today
• How Page Speed Correlates to Business Metrics - Web Performance Today

Makes it possible to get into low-bandwidth and mobile-only areas

• (Pacific Islands, Africa, South Asia, South America)
• 23 Stats on Mobile Web Performance - Soasta

Users get more work done before running of patience or time

• Nobody likes waiting, and patience and willpower are finite. If our experience is slow, users would rather be somewhere else, like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Baidu, etc.

Here are some web performance experiments to prove it

Akamai and Gomez.com found:

• Speed is a Killer - KissMetrics
• Nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. - Users tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. - 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with site performance say they won’t return to buy again and around 44% would tell a friend if they had a poor experience

Google found:

• Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
• 77% of searches from mobile devices take place at home or work, only 17% on the move.

Amazon found:

• Every 100ms increase in load time decreased sales by 1%

HTTPArchive found:

• Between 2011 and 2015, pagesize increased by nearly 3x, topping 2,000 kB (709kB to 2,008 kB)

Radware found:

• 55 web performance stats you’ll want to know

Web Performance Today found:

• The Great Web Slowdown Infographic

Ericsson Mobility Report found:

• While mobile 3G and 4G LTE subscriptions are increasing rapidly, 2G-level subscriptions are currently around 4.5 billion, and will still stay as high as 2 billion until around the year 2020. This means keeping site weight low will continue to stay important for several years to come(pg. 7)
• Mobile saturation for China, Africa, and India are still below 100%, so we can expect several more mobile-only users coming online in the next few years, Many of whom have only used internet on a mobile device.(pg. 5)
• “90% of the world’s population over 6 years old will have a mobile phone by 2020” (pg. 6)
• Central Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific are still predominantly 2G-based mobile subscriptions, and will still be under 50% LTE by 2020 (pg. 9)