#ASKTHEINDUSTRY 12: Let’s talk business. Should my company care about its website’s performance?

Web Performance is not always the right thing to focus on, that’s true. However, it becomes fundamental for all those businesses which count on their web presence to make revenue.

Let’s take a recent success story: Housing.com. Housing is one of India’s most successful startups. It’s a real estate search portal which allows customers to search for housing in many different cities. It has quickly become one of the India’s leaders in the sector.

Their mobile users would react to slow load times by leaving the site.

They had a fundamental problem with their platform: their mobile users, who typically connected from slow and unreliable networks, would react to slow load times by leaving the site. They decided to understand better the scenario and measured the correlation between page-load time and their conversion rate. Needless to say, they found that even a one-second improvement brought a significant boost.

Their first reaction was to develop a native app so that mobile users could work offline. In addition, installed native apps usually show an higher level of re-engagement. It turned out to be not enough to close the gap with their customers: due to the high cost of Internet access people hesitated to use data or space to download the native app.

The results of building a PWA have been great: 38% increase in conversions and 40% decrease in bounce rate

So they took the other way, they transformed their site to a PWA that was fast, efficient and reliable. The results have been great: 38% increase in conversions and 40% decrease in bounce rate; in addition, by increasing page-load performance by 30% they observed an increase in the average time-per-session by 10%.

I read each and every comment, and look forward to answer to your questions! This piece is part of the #ASKTHEINDUSTRY project, which is supposed to be about your questions :) Drop a comment if there is anything I can help you with!