Part 1: Study Kickoff

Web performance is critical for business success, because users leave when page loads take too long. Although this statement is generally undisputed, the exact correlation between site speed metrics and business KPIs has not been fully pinned down, yet. It further remains a challenge to replicate existing research which is often based on individual case studies and data points. While these studies do inspire, they are also not easily comparable among one another.

With our latest study, we want to add a scientifically sound methodology to the ecosystem to showcase how site speed metrics and business KPIs are correlated.

What is Page Speed Actually Worth?

In spite of the rapid evolution of both Web technologies and user devices, many businesses keep struggling with Web performance. And even though Web performance optimization is a technical challenge, the major roadblocks are not necessarily of purely technical nature: Investing resources into Website acceleration is often simply considered a gamble and therefore eschewed, since there is no hard data on what a second of load time is worth — or what exactly you have to invest to make the acceleration happen.

This is the first in a series of blog posts to resolve this dilemma. We will explore the relationship between technical Website performance, good user experience, and measured business success. This blog series builds upon research conducted by Baqend, Google, and the University of Hamburg since 2019.

What This Blog Series Is About

Over the next months, we will address Web performance and its relationship to business success from different angles. First, we will survey and summarize existing research on user expectations in the mobile Web context to answer the question when users are most likely to engage or buy. We then assume the business perspective and explore the correlation between technical performance measures and pivotal business key performance indicators (KPIs) in different e-commerce verticals. Having thus established the business impact of Web performance, we turn to the challenge of measuring site speed & business performance correctly. To this end, we will discuss how to gain business insights from production data, covering technical and user-centric performance measures, synthetic performance tests, tracking, and log analysis in the process. To provide actionable recommendations, we will then sum up the most effective best-practices to increase Web performance and drive up user engagement, before covering more advanced approaches for both data collection and performance optimization.

The last post in this series will be a synoptic discussion of what you can do to accelerate your online presence and how much business value this could yield.

Learn More

We created a research hub for all new results on the topic — just register for the speedstudy.info newsletter to have all updates delivered to your digital doorstep. (No spamming, promise!) In the meantime, you can also check out our code.talks 2019 presentation video on what we currently know about “Mobile Site Speed & the Impact on E-Commerce”.

Stay fast & stay tuned!