
Ask HN: When Is the Last Time You've Looked into Your Site's Load Speeds? - spqr233
Amazon said that they lose 1% in checkouts for every 0.1 seconds of latency on their pages so it&#x27;s clear that it&#x27;s important. But for some reason, I feel like we don&#x27;t seem to focus on it as much as other parts of improving user experience. Why is that?
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seanwilson
I check my loading speed every time I change the site because my project
promotes web best practices and I want to lead by example. :)

[https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/)

The whole page is about 0.1MB transferred and should render in about 0.5s on
desktop.

The basic tricks used: It's a static site (so no SPA issues), uses HTTP/2,
uses a CDN, the big header screenshot is an inlined SVG image so it's small +
loads super fast + has high detail, blocking JavaScript isn't required for
displaying anything, small CSS footprint, CSS is inlined into the page header
and self-hosted fonts that don't block page rendering while they load.

> Amazon said that they lose 1% in checkouts for every 0.1 seconds of latency
> on their pages

These statistics would be highly dependent on the type of website I imagine.
If you were trying to buy a product from a website where you knew you could
only buy it from that website you're going to be much more patient for
example.

Everyone likes a fast website though.

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holler
For me it's something I do focus on, albeit to the extent reasonable. I'm
working on a new chat site called sqwok.im and just like Amazon, there's real
concern that a slow page load could ward people off. There are two key areas
I've focused on in particular, one is api optimization, minimizing network
requests as much as possible, and the other is SSR or server-side rendering,
where some of the initial page data is rendered with the html, cached by cdn,
and loaded very fast after that. It's not perfect, but most page loads are
~300ms (unless you hit a page that isn't cached of course). May do a write up
on that topic.

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spqr233
That's really good. I'd definitely would have read that if you wrote it up.

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codingdave
I do try to maintain a fast load speed, but I run a SaaS app for small
government, so we don't lose revenue due to poor load times. We lose
confidence in our app, which still something we want to avoid, and may have a
long term impact on revenue.

But the different business models are the reason that Amazon cares about 0.1
seconds, and will work to improve quickly, while I care more about 0.5 seconds
or higher and can defer it as technical debt.

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codegladiator
> so it's clear that it's important

for amazon

