I wonder if anyone has studied the impact of latency on user behavior while considering the impact of user expectations from their typical connection speed. Whenever I see an article about page speed optimization, the assumption is that a user will give up if a page takes too long to load, ans that everyone gives up after X seconds. Usually X is about 7s based on a Nielson article from years and years ago. The thing…
I don’t have a citation handy, but this is something that Google has famously studied. They claimed years ago that a tiny increase in the loading time of the Google home page led to a measurable decrease in the number of searches (like, a few percent). Not everyone is operating “at Google scale”, of course, but in aggregate the effect is real and faster-loading pages have better metrics. So, most satellite internet u…
All tests showed a drop in traffic, conversion, and average session value indistinguishable from zero. Our hypothesis is that our site (where a converting visitor is on average designing and ordering a custom product) is one where the difference between 30 minutes and 31 minutes is not meaningful and a lot of the time is spent in the web-based document editor. It would not generalize to a "give me a quick search result", "sell me an item from a warehouse shelf", or "let me argue with someone on a forum".
This was of course disappointing, because we ran this test as a sanity check after having done an extensive project to improve the page speed across the main conversion funnel. The project was technically successful, but a business zero (probably for the same hypothesis as above), so we decided to test in the other direction, because that's easier to implement than to force faster pages.