Google Demonstrated That Even A Sub-second Response Time Delay Has A Lingering Effect
Google demonstrated that even a sub-second response time delay has a lingering effect on user engagement, even weeks after the site was sped up again. A delay of this length might not be severe enough to warrant a critical alert, but it has a measurable impact on several metrics including revenue per user and user satisfaction.
Around the same time as Google demonstrated this result, a study conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Akamai found that most consumers expect a web page to load in under two seconds""compared to an expectation of under four seconds reported three years earlier. More than half of respondents said that quick page loading was an important factor for continued site loyalty.
For reasons such as these, I believe it's important not to undervalue medium-term and long-term performance monitoring. Keynote has several capabilities in this area including long term trending, time history graphs, and service level reports. Let's take a look at each of these capabilities in more detail.
Keynote retains aggregated performance data and provides long-term trend graphs for up to two years. For example, I can tell that the performance of the Google home page has been fairly consistent over the last couple of years, although lately website performance seems to be hovering closer to 0.5 seconds than the 0.3 second range exhibited in late 2008/early 2009.
For medium-term analysis, Keynote retains raw performance data for six weeks that users can analyze across a variety of dimensions using time history graphs. In the graph below, I've broken out the response time for the Google home page over the last four weeks into times for DNS lookup, connection, first byte download, and content download. As one would expect, of these components, the one that takes by far the most time is content download.
Around the same time as Google demonstrated this result, a study conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Akamai found that most consumers expect a web page to load in under two seconds""compared to an expectation of under four seconds reported three years earlier. More than half of respondents said that quick page loading was an important factor for continued site loyalty.
For reasons such as these, I believe it's important not to undervalue medium-term and long-term performance monitoring. Keynote has several capabilities in this area including long term trending, time history graphs, and service level reports. Let's take a look at each of these capabilities in more detail.
Keynote retains aggregated performance data and provides long-term trend graphs for up to two years. For example, I can tell that the performance of the Google home page has been fairly consistent over the last couple of years, although lately website performance seems to be hovering closer to 0.5 seconds than the 0.3 second range exhibited in late 2008/early 2009.
For medium-term analysis, Keynote retains raw performance data for six weeks that users can analyze across a variety of dimensions using time history graphs. In the graph below, I've broken out the response time for the Google home page over the last four weeks into times for DNS lookup, connection, first byte download, and content download. As one would expect, of these components, the one that takes by far the most time is content download.