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by always_good 3355 days ago
The thing is that, there aren't.

Only in our wet dreams exists a competitive edge where you copy a website 1:1 but use vanilla JS over their jQuery so things load a tiny bit faster and their users flock over to your website, chanting your name.
2 comments
candiodari 3355 days ago
Really ?

https://blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-late...

http://glinden.blogspot.com.au/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-...

I'm sure I read essentially the same from ebay as well at some point. It's worse than being a competitive advantage : extra milliseconds seem to matter a lot for the size of the market in the first place.

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always_good 3355 days ago
Nowhere upstream did someone say "smaller isn't better".
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paulcole 3355 days ago
If Amazon loads .1 second slower, are users not buying from Amazon or not buying at all? Until you know the answer to that you're not really making a convincing point.
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xs 3354 days ago
Whoa whoa whoa. Amazon has focused on page speed load and user experience for over a decade. Their core business is their website. They have refined and improved thousands of times. You should ask "What would happen to Amazon's sales if they suddenly stopped caring about page speed?" The answer is over time they will add additional bloaty libraries and it will eventually slow down to a horrible crawl. This will likely start turning customers away who want a better user experience.

On a daily basis I have to interact with HPE's website. Now THAT's a company that could care less about their user's experience on their website. Pages take on average 20 seconds to load and sometimes up to 3 minutes! They are lucky that it's not their website that is their business but it's their products or else they'd lose business so fast. I absolutely HATE interacting with their site because of how slow it is. I can deal with bad UX if the site is quick to load, but I can't deal with bad UX if the site is extremely slow.

Another thing to think about is simple single content pages, like ones that just tell you the time, or tell you what your IP address is. The ones at the top of Google searches pay extremely close attention to page speed load times. There is so much competition in their space that they know they need to be the best and that is just another way to do that.

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yellowbeard 3355 days ago
From Amazon's perspective it's the same and worth optimizing
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huac 3355 days ago
No, it's not. If a user chooses a 'no purchase' option then it means that the product assortment offered was not worth it for the price. That means Amazon needs to change the assortments of products it offers users. If a user chooses to purchase elsewhere, it means Amazon needs to improve the website.
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castellar 3354 days ago
That's assuming a consumer decides to purchase something solely based on price/product assortment and there's no impulse factor. One could very well be willing to purchase something at one moment but 30 seconds later be unwilling. I wonder if anyone has any data on time spent on a website vs. likelihood of making a purchase.
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benologist 3355 days ago
https://lite.twitter.com just launched, eventually that may show a preference either way.
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Radle 3354 days ago
Twitter is a page with only one feature. Lite.Twitter is a version of that feature for a very specific subset of mobile users.

In 99,9% of cases it's not worth it to go ultra lightweight.

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