Users really respond to speed.—Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of the research section and user experience.
We will explain why this quote is true throughout this chapter. Her key insight for the crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit is that "slow and steady doesn't win the race". Today people want fast and furious. Not convinced? Okay, let's have a look at some arguments:
500ms lost is to lose 20 percent of traffic for Google (this might be why there are only ten results per page in the research).
Increased latency of 100ms costs 1 percent of sales for Amazon.
Reducing by 25 percent the weight of a page is to win 25 percent of users in the medium term for Google.
Losing 400ms is to have a 5-9 percent drop in addition to Yahoo!, an editorial site.
As we can see, this is the era of milliseconds and terabytes, so we have to pay a big price if we can't keep up. This chapter will ensure the optimum performance of your Magento store and overcome some of the most common pitfalls that people...