Fighting the high costs of poor web performance

There is one thing successful internet companies such as Amazon, Twitter and Google have in common: Web performance. They are fast, scalable and reliable. You would quickly choose a different search engine if Google was slow. Or if it kept crashing. In fact research shows that we will abandon a site if it is slower than its competitor by one quarter of a second. That is less time than it takes you to blink an eye!

What causes websites to underperform?

What makes a website slow is often too much load on the backend. As the internet has grown web servers have had to process more and more objects on sites, cope with larger page sizes, growing traffic numbers and cyber attacks. All this can result in a slow and unreliable website that frequently crashes. Meanwhile, the users have become more and more impatient and will surely abandon your website if it doesn’t live up to their standards.

What are the related costs of poor web performance?

The costs of underperforming websites are high for an online business. According to research from the Aberdeen Group, one second delay on a website will result in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and seven percent reduction in online sales. This can mean huge costs related to lost sales opportunities as covered earlier on this blog. Not to to mention the costs related to lost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

And for companies that are vulnerable to cyber attacks or other causes of downtime the costs can pile up. Downtime alone can result in costs related to:

• Lost sales opportunities
• Lost customers
• Lost employee productivity
• Damaged reputation
• System restoration

How to fight underperformance and the related costs?

Your website may not be vulnerable to attacks or other causes of downtime. But for competitive reasons it is important for all online businesses, big and small, to offer optimal online speed and reliability to their users. That’s why content-heavy, dynamic websites such as the BBC and Facebook were among the first to use Varnish Cache to give their websites a boost. And with good results!

Download our whitepaper, The high price of poor web performance, to read more on how you can fight the costs of poor web performance and figure out whether you should go for the open source or subscription version of Varnish.