Ask HN: When Is the Last Time You've Looked into Your Site's Load Speeds?

6 points by spqr233 6 years ago | 5 comments

Amazon said that they lose 1% in checkouts for every 0.1 seconds of latency on their pages so it's clear that it's important. But for some reason, I feel like we don't seem to focus on it as much as other parts of improving user experience. Why is that?

seanwilson 6 years ago |

I check my loading speed every time I change the site because my project promotes web best practices and I want to lead by example. :)

https://www.checkbot.io/

The whole page is about 0.1MB transferred and should render in about 0.5s on desktop.

The basic tricks used: It's a static site (so no SPA issues), uses HTTP/2, uses a CDN, the big header screenshot is an inlined SVG image so it's small + loads super fast + has high detail, blocking JavaScript isn't required for displaying anything, small CSS footprint, CSS is inlined into the page header and self-hosted fonts that don't block page rendering while they load.

> Amazon said that they lose 1% in checkouts for every 0.1 seconds of latency on their pages

These statistics would be highly dependent on the type of website I imagine. If you were trying to buy a product from a website where you knew you could only buy it from that website you're going to be much more patient for example.

Everyone likes a fast website though.

holler 6 years ago |

For me it's something I do focus on, albeit to the extent reasonable. I'm working on a new chat site called sqwok.im and just like Amazon, there's real concern that a slow page load could ward people off. There are two key areas I've focused on in particular, one is api optimization, minimizing network requests as much as possible, and the other is SSR or server-side rendering, where some of the initial page data is rendered with the html, cached by cdn, and loaded very fast after that. It's not perfect, but most page loads are ~300ms (unless you hit a page that isn't cached of course). May do a write up on that topic.

spqr233 6 years ago | |

That's really good. I'd definitely would have read that if you wrote it up.

codingdave 6 years ago |

I do try to maintain a fast load speed, but I run a SaaS app for small government, so we don't lose revenue due to poor load times. We lose confidence in our app, which still something we want to avoid, and may have a long term impact on revenue.

But the different business models are the reason that Amazon cares about 0.1 seconds, and will work to improve quickly, while I care more about 0.5 seconds or higher and can defer it as technical debt.

codegladiator 6 years ago |

> so it's clear that it's important

for amazon