Technology, Web

A recent presentation at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference jointly presented by Google and Microsoft engineers, has highlighted the importance of page rendering speed to keep users engaged in an online experience. This may at first seem like common sense. If a site is slow, users are likely to grow frustrated and not use your site anymore. However, what is interesting is that this is perhaps the first time that such big players in the online space, have published the results of internal experiments that actually demonstrated the true impact that page rendering speed can have on online user experience.

At first glance the numbers themselves may seem small, but keep in mind that these are two sites that have tens of millions of users per day. A tiny change in page rendering speed, can have a pretty significant impact over time, especially when your core business is search.

What can we learn from this?

• Speed matters (the obvious one)
• Costs of delay increase overtime and remain persistent (you’ve lost users)
• What you show a user, is more important then it’s actual size

The last point is interesting. What that essentially means is that, it’s important to consider how a page is rendered, and optimize or use techniques, that let you decrease the perceived loading time.

Performance optimizations are important. They are typically neglected, not budgeted for, or done as an after-thought, which can hurt in the long run. However, it is foolish to assume that a particular site can be fast just by doing a couple of tweaks. On the contrary, optimization is a methodical process, which takes small but several aspects into account, which together can bring faster performance and user experience responsiveness.