At the June 2009 Velocity Conference, a common theme was: speed matters for websites (see also the summary by O’Reilly Radar). People from Google, Bing, WordPress, AOL, Facebook, Shopzilla, and many other organizations gave presentations highlighting the importance of making their websites load and perform functions faster. Among the findings: differences of a few hundred milliseconds in the time taken to display search results yielding in a decrease in the total number of searches performed, the decrease being both significant and statistically significant.
While Matt Mullenweg of WordPress says:
That’s why [performance] is important and why we should be obsessed and not be discouraged when it doesn’t change the funnel. My theory here is when an interface is faster, you feel good. And ultimately what that comes down to is you feel in control. The web app isn’t controlling me, I’m controlling it. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.
some might argue that the fact that the fact that website owners, by shaving off a few milliseconds of performance time, can make us visit their sites more indicates that users somehow have less conscious control. After all, many people don’t think that they’ll search more if Google’s page loads faster. What does this say about conscious consumption in the context of web usage?
On a related note, Tyler Cowen, in his book Create Your Own Economy, muses about the mental costs of visiting blogs:
Usually a blog will fail if the blogger doesn’t post every day or at least every weekday. People don’t like the idea of visiting the blog and coming away empty-handed, so to speak. It only seems like a visit to the blog is costless; in reality we get a brief pang of pain from “coming up empty.” And once a blog disappoints I classify the site as a “NO.” The site is still only a click away, but for most practical purposes the cost of revisiting the site is now virtually infinite. In my emotional universe that site no longer exists for me and it holds a status lower than the proverbial needle in the haystack.