“High performance web sites lead to higher visitor engagement, retention and conversions” — Google PageSpeed

We live in an instant gratification culture. If we push a button, we expect a response, whether it’s to call an elevator or to order a product. In the mobile world, this translates to 47% of users expecting a service to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of users claim to abandon a website that takes over 4 seconds to load. These are staggering figures with severe implications for creating a satisfying mobile service. In this article, we will look at what research says about user expectations and examples of performance online, as well as outline an approach that helps address the challenges presented.

Users won’t wait

Mobile connections are slow, not optimising your service speed will lose revenue, what can take 0.5s on desktop can take over 3 seconds even on a 3G connection. TagMan did a study and saw that a one second delay can cause a 7% loss in conversions. Aside from abandonment, slow services harm brand value and can cause upset users to scathe a business in social media. Additionally, your service’s performance affects your SEO ranking.

Think of performance as a feature

By now it’s clear that performance is critical. The challenge is how to integrate performance into your development process so that it doesn’t become an afterthought, as trying to optimize at the very last sprint will most likely only cause frustration. Even if you’re developing a native application, high performance is never a given. Regardless of how your service is delivered, it has to work as fast as possible, responding rapidly to user actions.

One way to integrate performance metrics into your project is to think of performance as a feature. Create goals and processes that will ensure your service works within the limits you define, such as having the front page load in less than 5 seconds on a 3G connection. There’s no substitute for focused work to create an understanding of what data is needed to deliver your service and optimize it by defining what cache intervals are acceptable and how to utilise third party services such as content distribution networks to maximise your services performance.

Various techniques can be used to enhance the speediness of your user experience, from cacheing to inline code that increase perceived performance that can increase user satisfaction.

There is no silver bullet that will take care of performance, rather it is an issue that requires architectural considerations and optimisations across your entire service. It is imperative that your organisation pay attention to performance and do what is possible to increase its responsiveness.