The google homepage doing a lot more was pointed out earlier, I've updated the page to reflect that.
> If Jacques blog gets a significant amount more traffic by loading super fast then that's a definite, measurable success. If the only change is that it loads faster, and he doesn't grow his audience, then he hasn't really achieved anything.
If audience growth were the target, then yes that's true. But what matters too is that the audience that you already have does not spend more money (downloaded bytes on mobile for instance) or time (delay time waiting for stuff to load) than they really need to. On top of that I suspect (but can't prove) that a faster site will lead to people viewing more pages on that same site simply because of the convenience. For ad driven sites (which this is definitely not) that might turn into more turnover, and for e-commerce sites (which there is plenty of proof for) faster load times result in more turnover.
Keeping your users happy is important, even if you don't attract more of them directly. (Retention is a very important factor in a growth strategy...)
Premature optimization is definitely the root of all evil, but bloat is something you can do without. It's a matter of striking the right balance and I think that this blog probably is on the 'wrong' side of that balance but I just wanted to make an example of how much bloat there really is.
"On top of that I suspect (but can't prove) that a faster site will lead to people viewing more pages on that same site simply because of the convenience."
I'm reasonably sure that this theory is backed up by data. I don't have the time to look up the studies just now, but as someone with a professional interest in this, I'm pretty sure I've seen them in the past.
Certainly, page speed has a surprisingly large impact on overall user experience - backed up by studies like Amazon's and Google's, both of which showed a correlation between faster page load and increased user activity.
Just an anecdotal evidence, I open fefe's blog (http://blog.fefe.de/), which is quite popular in the German hacker scene, several times a day, often just to check whether the data connection is working, since it's so basic and loads instantly.
> If Jacques blog gets a significant amount more traffic by loading super fast then that's a definite, measurable success. If the only change is that it loads faster, and he doesn't grow his audience, then he hasn't really achieved anything.
If audience growth were the target, then yes that's true. But what matters too is that the audience that you already have does not spend more money (downloaded bytes on mobile for instance) or time (delay time waiting for stuff to load) than they really need to. On top of that I suspect (but can't prove) that a faster site will lead to people viewing more pages on that same site simply because of the convenience. For ad driven sites (which this is definitely not) that might turn into more turnover, and for e-commerce sites (which there is plenty of proof for) faster load times result in more turnover.
Keeping your users happy is important, even if you don't attract more of them directly. (Retention is a very important factor in a growth strategy...)
Premature optimization is definitely the root of all evil, but bloat is something you can do without. It's a matter of striking the right balance and I think that this blog probably is on the 'wrong' side of that balance but I just wanted to make an example of how much bloat there really is.