Feature Story 57 www.technologyreview.

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Next, because Googles true goal was to improve all browsers, it
launched an ad campaign focused on the idea that a faster browser
was a better one. Since then, rival browsers Firefox, Safari, Opera,
and Internet Explorer have all signicantly sped up and given that
metric top billing in marketing materials.
If browsers needed to get faster, though, so did websites them-
selves. In April 2010, Google engaged a powerful weapon to force
other sites to improve their performance: it announced that it would
begin taking site speed into account when ranking pages in its
search engine. As everyone on the Internet knows, if your site is not
visible in the rst page of Googles search results, you barely exist.
The best solutions of all, Rabbat and Jain realized, would spread
with as little human intervention as possible. As Rabbat puts it,
Instead of telling people what the problems are, can we just x
it for them automatically? Late in 2010, Google released a free
tool that website administrators can download. It analyzes sites
Percentage of users who look at
a promotion if slide loads*
Consequences of a one-second delay Consequences of longer site-load time Users who ...
How long a person will wait for page to
load before navigating away
20%
1%
instantaneously
after 8
seconds
Instant load 8 sec. load 2000 2005 2009
Fewer
page views
11%
Decreased
customer
satisfaction
Lost
conversions
16%
27%
30%
50%
have shopped online with a phone.
said shopping was too slow.
want to shop online in the future.
expect sites to download as quickly on
mobile devices as on home computers.
5 sec. 3 sec. 10 sec.
Bounce rate
Lost page
views
Lost
conversions
135%
105%
50%
22%
22%
38%
46%
42%
35%
16%
7%
of users will abandon
a site or switch to
a competitor after
experiencing
performance
issues.
49%
8 seconds
5 seconds
3 seconds
THE NEED FOR SPEED
Even slight slowdowns online frustrate people and cost companies money.
Even a brief delay leads to a lower conver-
sion rate, which means that a sites visitors
take fewer desired actions.
Slow sites get fewer conversions than ones
that load in a second, and they have higher
bounce ratesthey lose more users.
Speed will become an even more important
factor for companies as people increasingly
access the Web from mobile devices.
Note: *For slide show taking up 23% of a page. Source:
Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group
Source: Akamai Source: Sean Power, cofounder of the consulting rm
Watching Websites
Source: Aberdeen Group Source: Strangeloop Source: Gomez
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