The most underrated feature affecting user experience is speed. Fast page load must be a priority, along with great concept design.

We’ve all heard the classic case: Amazon generated 1% more sales for every 100ms they shaved off the page load time (the original slide deck by Greg Linden). That was almost a decade ago, but users’ preference for speed has only increased. NY Times:

People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250ms.

A typical modern web page loading html, css and javascript takes roughly 4-8 seconds to fully load. Thus, we are talking about making the page 3-5% faster. While 250 milliseconds sounds very little to me, 5% sounds much more significant.

Walmart utilized Real User Monitoring (RUM) analysis to their site and found out that there’s a strong correlation with:

• High conversion rates and fast pages
• High bounce rate and slow pages

Their conclusion seems to verify the 100ms less = 1% more rule.

Making a site fast is not trivial. It’s a science in itself and requires a lot of effort. In addition to the technical challenges there’s the psychological side. Perceived speed is more important than actual speed.

Too often the 250ms is not considered important by concept designers and start-ups building web-based businesses. It should be top prio. Fast page loads mean business!

There are plenty of tools for figuring out how to improve your page speed. For example, this one by Google is very good (especially so because it shows that we’ve done the right things at Nimenhuuto.com): https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights