The Business Case for Speed

The Business Case for Speed

jordibuj@siriusway.com

Overview

•  Communication – Business & IT

•  Activities and metrics

•  Pleasing users

•  Pleasing search engines

•  Success stories

•  Methodology

A brief introduction to myself

a fast ecommerce makes more money performance tuning

performance assessments

ecommerce implementations

My background

•  Software Developer? •  IT Specialist? •  Database Specialist? •  IT Architect? •  Project Leader?

•  Java Enterprise •  OO Analysis & Design •  DB2 & other databases •  TDD, CI & other Agile practices •  Mostly back end, critical infrastructure / apps

–  Performance matters

Business & IT communication

Speed (for business)

•  Technical detail

•  Non-functional requirement

•  i.e. less important than design details

•  i.e. taken for granted

•  “Logically” put at the end of the plan

•  i.e. never done

•  It’s not going to be more expensive, is it?

•  Is a Ferrari as expensive as a Seat?

Speed (for IT)

•  yeah, it’s great but..

•  It complicates the code

•  It makes you RTFM

•  It complicates the architecture

•  It complicates the HW & SW platform

•  It’s difficult to test

•  It needs specialized skills – DevOps!

•  ... oh, and then there are the “let’s optimize this code, just in case it’s slow” types

How can we speak about it?

What drives the business?

•  Business objectives (sell products)

•  Marketing strategy (obtain and retain customers)

•  Budget (costs)

•  Trends

•  Politics

The obvious activities

•  Web design

•  Pricing rules and promotions

•  Advertising

•  SEO

•  SMM

•  Content marketing

•  Web development (the easy part)

The obvious KPIs

•  Total sales

•  Revenue

•  Number of users

•  Returning users

•  Number of page views

•  Goal conversion rate

•  Shopping cart abandonment rate

•  Bounce rate

•  Click through rate

Now IT is introducing

•  Image optimization

•  CSS Sprites

•  Placement of scripts and styles

•  Gzip compression

•  Keep alive connections

•  CDNs

•  Expires headers

•  Domain sharding

... and wants to measure

•  Time to first byte

•  Time to interact

•  TIme to Doc Complete

•  Time to fully load

•  PageSpeed score

•  Speed index

•  Throughput

•  Cache hit ratio

Looks like IT needs to work it out

We need to please:

-  Users

-  Search engines

Pleasing users

ü Nice design

ü Great products

ü Gorgeous pictures

ü Easy navigation

ü Useful content

ü Streamlined checkout and payment

ü Fast and convenient shipment

ü Sense of security

Users like speed

Forrester / Akamai

•  52% of users relate site speed with returning to the site

•  47% of users expect load time < 2s

•  79% of ecommerce users think that a dissatisfying visit makes less likely to buy again – And 27% even from a physical store

h"p://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_091409.html  

BrandPerfect

•  66% of UK users think that the biggest irritation of a site is slowness (#1 cause)

•  90% of users share their online shopping experience (good or bad)

•  Top three requests for online shopping – Safer (61%)

– Easy to navigate (58%)

– Faster (52%)

h"p://brandperfect.org/index.php/knowledge/reports  

Radware

h"p://blog.radware.com/applicaAondelivery/applicaAonacceleraAonopAmizaAon/2013/05/case-­‐study-­‐page-­‐load-­‐Ame-­‐conversions/  

Pleasing search engines

ü Focus on quality and unique content

ü Use title and meta tags

ü Maintain a consistent document structure

ü Build friendly URL structure

ü Use alt tags for images

ü Use rich data

ü Guide robots with a site map.

Search engines like speed, too

The Oracle

h"p://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2010/04/using-­‐site-­‐speed-­‐in-­‐web-­‐search-­‐ranking.html  

Zoompf

h"p://moz.com/blog/how-­‐website-­‐speed-­‐actually-­‐impacts-­‐search-­‐ranking  

Is it possible to correlate performance optimization with

any business KPI improvement?

Sucess stories

Walmart

1s improvement in load time

2% increase in conversion rate

Walmart

http://minus.com/msM8y8nyh  

Obama 2012 campaign

60% decrease in response time

14% increase in donations

Obama 2012 campaign

h"p://kylerush.net/blog/meet-­‐the-­‐obama-­‐campaigns-­‐250-­‐million-­‐fundraising-­‐plaHorm/  

Firefox

2.2s improvement in response time

15.4% increase in number of

downloads

Firefox

http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/category/website-optimization/  

Shopzilla

Response time from 6s to 1.2s

10% growth in revenue

50% decline in operational costs

Shopzilla

http://velocityconf.com/velocity2009/public/schedule/detail/7709  

Intuit

Response time from 15s to 2s

10 points reduction in

shopping cart abandonment

Intuit

http://velocityconf.com/velocityny2013/public/schedule/detail/30146  

Now our turn. Can we do it (and not fail?)

Remember? - Speed (for IT)

•  yeah, it’s great but..

•  It complicates the code

•  It makes you RTFM

•  It complicates the architecture

•  It complicates the HW & SW platform

•  It’s difficult to test

•  It needs specialized skills – DevOps!

•  ... oh, and then there are the “let’s optimize this code, just in case it’s slow” types

Methodology?

•  Ideal: Include performance optimization in your development process

•  Best: at least do it – Performance check lists

•  Steve Souders: High Performance Web Sites

– Trivial vs. high impact (implementation, development process, architecture)

– How do you know if it is affecting you?

You don’t need another performance checklist, you need

a performance optimization methodology

h"p://siriusway.com/performance-­‐blog/improve-­‐website-­‐performance-­‐part-­‐two/  

Start today

•  Google Analytics – page speed and bounce rate

•  http://siriusway.com/performance-blog/how-to-know-if-your-site-performance-is-related-to-your-bounce-rate/

More References

•  http://zoompf.com/business-case

•  http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/06/15/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-web-performance/

•  http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2014/04/09/web-page-speed-affect-conversions-infographic/

White paper

h"p://siriusway.com/download-­‐white-­‐paper/    

Reach me at

•  jordibuj@siriusway.com

•  http://siriusway.com/performance-blog/

•  @jordibuj

•  http://es.linkedin.com/in/jordibuj/