Why performance is important on mobile

A steady stream of data has surfaced over the past few years that highlights the correlation of performance with user engagement. For example:

• Walmart found that each one second decrease in page load time resulted in a 2 percent increase in conversions (slideshare.net/devonauerswald/walmart-pagespeedslide)
• Amazon reported that a 100 ms increase in latency resulted in a 1 percent reduction in sales (blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales/)
• Barack Obama's US presidential campaign saw a 14 percent increase in donations with a 60 percent increase in site speed (kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform)
• Google found that a half second longer search page generation time caused traffic to drop by 20 percent (glinden.blogspot.gr/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html)

Clearly, performance has an impact on conversions. While the exact numbers will vary from study to study, any research you see on the subject will confirm the trend: as page load time increases, bounce rate increases, and conversion rate decreases. If your site is slow, you're going to lose out.