A somewhat cheeky subject line, I know, but I wanted to get people's attention. Let me explain:
My team's job is to run experiments that tell us why Wikipedia editors stay or leave.[1] One of the conclusions we've come to is that we have zero data on how site performance impacts editor retention (IP editors included).
We could throw all our energy into building cool new features, but if people still have a frustrating experience because contributing is appreciably slower than reading (for purely technical reasons), we have no idea what the net loss is. We really need to know what the numbers here are, not just assume that slower is bad in an unquantifiable way.
We could get a measure of this by artificially slowing down the site for a subset of users, but we'd rather not do that for obvious reasons. So my proposal is this: if you're going to deploy anything that you think might effect English Wikipedia site performance, positive or negative, tell us beforehand and we'll measure its impact on users for you.
-- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/
I'm not sure if it's really needed to find out *if* site speed influences visits. They do, and they are very heavily influenced by site speed.
Effects of Website Speed on Revenue & Experience
- Shopzilla increased page load time from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds and increased revenue by 12% and page views by 25%.
- Amazon increased revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of improvement.
- AOL documents that visitors in the top 10th percentile of site speed viewed 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10th percentile.
- Yahoo! increased traffic by 9% for every 400 milliseconds of improvement.
- By reducing the website by 2.2 seconds Mozilla estimates that 60 million more Firefox downloads occur every year.
Source: Make Data Useful by Greg Linden at Amazon
Some of these numbers are already a few years old. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are even bigger these days.
-- Siebrand Mazeland
M: +31 6 50 69 1239 Skype: siebrand
Op 3 aug. 2012 om 22:02 heeft Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org het volgende geschreven:
A somewhat cheeky subject line, I know, but I wanted to get people's attention. Let me explain:
My team's job is to run experiments that tell us why Wikipedia editors stay or leave.[1] One of the conclusions we've come to is that we have zero data on how site performance impacts editor retention (IP editors included).
We could throw all our energy into building cool new features, but if people still have a frustrating experience because contributing is appreciably slower than reading (for purely technical reasons), we have no idea what the net loss is. We really need to know what the numbers here are, not just assume that slower is bad in an unquantifiable way.
We could get a measure of this by artificially slowing down the site for a subset of users, but we'd rather not do that for obvious reasons. So my proposal is this: if you're going to deploy anything that you think might effect English Wikipedia site performance, positive or negative, tell us beforehand and we'll measure its impact on users for you.
-- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I'm not sure if it's really needed to find out *if* site speed influences visits. They do, and they are very heavily influenced by site speed.
Yeah, to be clear here: what I'm asking is not if. It's how much.
Steven
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org