If you have a useful product, service or content site, the utility of it is bound to attract an audience and convert it into loyal customers or users. And everyone in your company should work on optimizing the related key business metrics (e.g. unique visitors conversion, interactions per visit, cost per conversion, bounce rate, exit pages).

Your CEO is not always right:

There are hundreds of different ways you can reduce acquisition costs or increase retention and conversion, but there is only one where development and operations team have the lead: Web Performance Optimization. As a developer or an operation guy you like to optimize web performance because it will make users happiers, but your CEO don’t see interest in spending too much time on webperf optimization.

A common blunder CEOs make:

“if nobody complains about web performance, budget should be spent on marketing”.

However, visitors rarely complain about poor performance… they just leave. Few hundreds of milliseconds can make a huge difference, and visitors often do this unconsciously. Waiting time gives your visitors time to switch to another activity or worst, to a competitor website.Many studies have measure the impact of web performance on key business metrics:

  • 1 second of load time increase would result in $ 1.6 billion revenues loss for Amazon ;
  • 0.5 second of additional response time would result in 20% less search for Google ;
  • performance optimization on an e-commerce site can result in 13% increase revenue;
  • Google takes performance into account in its PageRank algorithm.

To make it more visual, here is a list of related infographics (you can find much more on Google image):

  • Strangeloop [1] (www)
  • SmartBear [2] (www)
  • Radware [3] (www)
  • KISSmetrics [4] (www)

Another blunder CEOs make:

“These studies concern Internet Giants, it does not apply to our business.”

While your website might be an exception, web performance impact user experience and thus business. Further more, if nobody in your company measure correlation between web performance and business performance, you can’t leverage web performance in business performance.

The 4 reasons why web performance matters

So here is a list of reasons why your CEO should care about Web Performance optimization:

SEO

Seach engine like Google must crawl billions of pages each day. The more pages bots crawl from your website, the more keywords lead to your website and the higher your website ranks in search results. However, search engines crawling resource are limited. Depending on your domain rank, crawlers spend a certain amount of time on your website. As a result, the faster you feed the bots, the more pages they will crawl. At basilic.io, we’ve seen an e-commerce website with 50% less page crawled by Google after a deployment that increased the time to first byte by one second.

Ads and Email Campaigns

Good Ads and Email campaigns generate a lot of trafic to your website. However, efficient ads and email campaign generate conversion and retention. If the trafic generated by the campaign negatively impacts your website performance, bounce rate will increase, while pageviews, conversion rate and mean cart amount will decrease. At Basilic, we’ve measured on an e-commerce site that a 2 seconds page load time increase during a campaign resulted in 28% lower conversion rate for other visitors. In other words, 28% of the marketing budget was wasted because of poor web performance during the campaign.

Mobile

Your company understand that mobile is a key to growth, so tens of thousands of dollars have been spent in responsive websites and mobile apps development. However user experience rely on smoothness, and thus on performance. If your company mobile efforts deliver poor user experience, key business metrics won’t reach objectives and a lot of money will be wasted. Moreover, with faster connections and new mobile processors, users are waiting for the same quality of experience on their mobile device and their computer; mobile performance impact on business will be even higher as time passes.

International

You company is successful in its own country. Internationalization is now the key to growth: Europe, South America, China, Russia, Japan, India are huge markets to conquer. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent in market studies, local team recruitments, website translation and marketing. However, conversion rates are much lower than in your own country. It is maybe because of poor web performance in foreign countries (where local competitors have optimize their websites for local visitors). If conversion is 30% lower than in your origin country because of poor performance, 30% of local marketing campaigns and human resources budgets are wasted.

Homework

This list is clearly not exhaustive, but it gives practical examples that your CEO and business team could adhere to. If you have other reasons in mind (the one you used to convince your CEO that he shouldn’t denigrate Web Performance), please share it in comments. Otherwise, start educating your CEO now, and next time we’ll tell you what are the important web performance metrics you should monitor and how to optimize each of them.