In the race to take your tech startup from the garage to a sexy tech office in the Loop, speed is a factor you’ll need to consider carefully. When is it too soon to launch your product? At what pace should you bring on new team members? How quickly should you plan to scale?
They’re all solid concerns, but the question of speed can be asked in a more literal (but equally notable) sense of the word: how fast should your site load?
According to , a content delivery network that couriers content to its users in real time, having a speedy and streamlined website is even more critical than you might think.
“People don’t want to wait,” said Fastly’s VP of Technology Hooman Beheshti. “Visitors come to your site expecting to see content, whether it’s the latest news, sports scores, or items on sale. If they don’t see what they came for quickly, they’ll go elsewhere. That usually translates to a negative impact on the bottom line. Studies continue to prove that faster pages result in more business, revenue increase, and better customer satisfaction.”
And Beheshti did his homework. For the web, one study found that 40 percent of users will quit a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. And slow-to-load mobile sites fare even worse: nearly three out of four users will head elsewhere if a site takes longer than five seconds to load.
That means that, even if you’ve developed the most innovative product in town, you’ve still got to have the site speed savvy to ensure whatever content you're producing actually gets in front of your audience.
While slow loading pages are a tumor for any site, Beheshti said they can be more detrimental for fledgling startups than their already established cyber neighbors.
“[Shoddy web performance] would certainly hurt their visibility and brand awareness — if visitors experience slow page loads the first time, it’s unlikely they’ll return,” he said, adding that slow page loads can also negatively influence SEO results.
In fact, optimizing web performance is one avenue younger companies can explore to gain a competitive edge.
“There’s likely a lower threshold in people’s minds when it comes to performance for newcomers,” Beheshti said. “One way a young company can make sure to keep its audience interested is to serve pages fast and efficiently. The goal should be to focus the new users on the site/application and not on how slowly it loads.”
The focus on product is important — especially for companies short on customers. Delays can trigger significant drops in lead conversions, so maintaining a well-oiled web or mobile site also helps build up your user base.
For startups, speed in all its iterations matter. It’s not in your best interest to compromise site speed for other elements of production, so you’ll want to make sure your devs are always on the lookout for performance issues.
“Developers should keep an eye on performance, building it into their apps from the very beginning and monitoring it throughout the development process” he said. “Offload as much content as you can onto a CDN, and take advantage of performance monitoring tools to make sure your site is operating at its best. And continue to monitor for performance degradation; quick and frequent feature iteration can lead to regression in performance over time. Continuous monitoring should help you keep an eye on that.”
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