[mrtksn]

Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast.

People don't go with reading plans to websites, the titles are optimized to bring you there and you don't know what's in the article. More often than not, the text on the website is not what the title made you believe it is. You can't plan ahead, you want to quickly find out what is this all about.

The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences that say the same thing but with different keywords. If that's not enough, they try to sway attention with ads and popups. Even if you had a plan about reading an article, the publisher's plan about you is different(tip: it's not about letting you read in peace).

The Web is horrible, it's even more horrible on mobile. AMP is an improvement.

[reaperducer]

Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast.

Is it? The only place I've ever seen push that view is Google. I've never seen any non-Google information reflecting that.

[gregable]

A few references listed in this article: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/why-site-spe...

- Mobify found that decreasing their homepage's load time by 100 milliseconds resulted in a 1.11% uptick in session-based conversion

- Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half

- Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%

[buboard]

those statements sound like incredible cherrypicking

does 1.11% sound a lot an is it statistically significant?

cut page in half from what to what? from 30 to 15 seconds? or from 2 to 1?

improving one second like how? from 12 to 11 or from 2 to 1? and is 2% really substantial?

[azylman]

Large companies spend a LOT of money trying to increase conversions by even tenths of a percent. Yes, 2% is substantial.

[buboard]

yeah , large companies. like , the 50-100 top sites right? Why would everybody else care about minor speed improvements

[dhimes]

I too am skeptical- except in extreme cases. Maybe if it's some sort of mindless bullshit site that I'm not really interested in I would leave it if it didn't load in, say, 5 seconds. But I don't really give a shit about the bullshit web. Life would be better without that anyway (except, of course, for companies who make a living selling ads on such sites).

But if somebody's leaving a page that has content they need because it doesn't load in 1 second, then I'd say they're a dumbass.

[buboard]

> users leave websites if they are not loading fast

then google is doing a bad job of presenting these sites to users, since obviously these sites should lose their rank, since users leave them. Google surely thinks bounce rates are important, no?

> The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences

and how is AMP fixing this? and who is responsible for SEO having these incentives? SEO literally means they optimize for what google wants

[mrtksn]

They do lose ranks[0].

AMP is fixing this because you can take a peek into the content almost instantaneously so you can just see what is this all about and leave.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...

[buboard]

i don't see why any webmaster would want users who "peek instantaneously and leave". what a waste of an http request