Earlier quoted context omitted.
> server-side rendering for each request in V8 might be more expensive to host than client side rendering in V8? Expensive not in money terms, but in user experience. Also: if you are doing e-commerce, 100ms added latency can cost you 7-8% in conversions. Spending 5% more on hosting to do SSR just makes economic sense.
> 100ms added latency can cost you 7-8% in conversions i hear this metric (or something equally absurd) cited frequently and have never seen it to be true in my own experience. i guess if you have to load a product page with 100 images (or assets) and each has 100ms network latency, then it will add up to much more than that. but 100ms for a single interaction or network request (e.g. process payment POST) is not goi…
At lower latencies no one is going to leave your site because it takes 1200ms instead of 1000ms to fully load a page. But at some point almost everyone is going to leave your site rather than wait.
I also find these stats really confusing because whenever someone talks to me about site performance they're always talking about a different metric (server response time, first paint, time to interactive, etc). If you're first paint is quick then users aren't going to care if content half way off the page doesn't load instantly.
I've always tried to focus on how fast things feel rather than worrying too much about specific metrics. If you can just get something (ideally the important bit(s)) to load really fast a site can feel extremely fast even if it's mostly just an illusion. Users like to click things and see stuff happening. It's things like reloading the page when adding items to cart then making them wait on a white screen for multiple that increases bounce times as abandoned carts in my experience. Making add to cart buttons an ajax request probably helps far more than making the page load 200ms faster.