A few kinds of businesses are nearly perfect laboratories for measuring human behavior. The first that comes to mind are casinos - their slot machines provide thousands of "subjects" daily for whatever experiments the revenue maximizers have in mind. A close second would be online gaming (not gambling) - the sample size is enormous, the environment is controlled by the company, and a key metric of success is the engagement level of the users. So, when the folks that keep Zynga's tens of millions of players addicted, it pays to listen.
BMWs vs. Toyotas
Speaking with Co.Design, Wright Bagwell, Zynga's director of design, comments:
People know what it means to touch something. They’ve touched things their whole lives. In the analog world, it’s instantaneous. When we come to the computer we expect that same interaction...
You can get in a Toyota Camry, then drive a BMW M3. Both have steering wheels and brakes, but when you accelerate in a BMW, you’re hooked. You can have two games that are basically the same game. But when you touch one, it’s a race car. The other is grandma’s grocery getter.
This isn't some designer's gut instinct - the "need for speed" and fluid performance has been determined by the measurement of the behavior of millions of users. There's compelling logic, too - the only reason we tolerate less than instant performance from websites is because our first Internet experiences were slow and we still encounter sluggish sites. As the best sites get faster and faster, we'll hold all the sites we visit to that standard.
Google Says Speed Counts
Perhaps Zynga, a firm with an unproven business model and disastrous post-IPO stock performance, isn't enough to sway your belief that the content of your site is a lot more important than how quickly it loads. Well, listen to what Google has to say. It's been more than a year since Google's Matt Cutts wrote about Google's incorporating page speed into its ranking factors:
Speeding up your website is a great thing to do in general. Visitors to your site will be happier (and might convert more or use your site more), and a faster web will be better for all...This change highlights that there are very constructive things that can directly improve your website’s user experience. Instead of wasting time on keyword meta tags, you can focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can really improve how users perceive your site.
While Cutts noted at the time that initially only a small percentage of sites would see a significant change in ranking or traffic due to page speed factors, I find it likely that the emphasis will increase over time. Google doesn't like to make sudden changes in its search results that dramatically affect normal, non-spammy websites. Having given webmasters fair notice, though, it's reasonable to expect them to phase in greater emphasis until they feel that most of their top results deliver a high level of performance.
Feeling Abandoned?
A study by Gomez.com showed that visitors leave sites in much higher numbers when pages take longer to load.
In fact, the Gomez numbers look conservative to me. Today's Web users don't expect pages to take 8 seconds to load, and they will have to be highly motivated to stick around on such a sluggish site.
Speed Sells
There's plenty of evidence to show that faster page loads increase the number of pages viewed on a site and, more importantly, boost sales. One recent study described on the Tagman blog using an online eyeglass site showed substantial correlation between speed and sales. In fact, a mere one-second delay in page load time was accompanied by a 7% decline in sales.
A widely quoted study by the Aberdeen Group found that, "A 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions." That study dates back to 2008, but if anything user expectations of fast page loads are on the rise.
See for Yourself
There's plenty of additional data out there that shows how improving site performance improves bottom line results. Rather than belaboring that point, I'll offer a few handy tools that let you check out the performance of your site and those of your competitors, too. These are all simple web-based tools, but there are a variety of browser plugins and services one can use as well:
Google Page Speed Insights. Type in a web address, and this handy tool will look at the page's code and assign a score from 0 to 100. The score represents how well optimized the page is for speed, but does NOT measure the actual load time. (The real load time, of course, is what users experience.) So, slow servers or connections or content from other sites (like third party ads or widgets) can kill performance even on a site that gets a great score.
Neustar Performance Test. This handy tool loads a page from four locations around the world and provides both average load times and a wealth of detail on how long each page element takes to load. It's not uncommon to see significant differences - my Brainy Marketing home page here at Forbes took just 1.85 seconds to load from Washington DC but more than 8 seconds in Singapore.
WhichLoadsFaster.com. Compete with another site head-on in this fun little test. Enter two web addresses, and the site loads both a couple of times and shows the winner based on average load time.
Have you worked to speed up your website and seen business metrics improve? Do you have a favorite tool for checking page speed or diagnosing slow elements? Share your findings in a comment!
Roger Dooley is the author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011). Find Roger on Twitter as @rogerdooley and at his website, Neuromarketing.


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