Performance is critical to the success of any website, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits. Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and web 2.0 applications. With the information deluge on the Internet, user's patience levels have been continuously decreasing. Slow websites lead to frustrated users, negative brand perception, increased operating expenses and loss of revenue. Tests done at Google in 2006 revealed that going from 10 to 30 results per page increased load time by a mere 0.5 seconds, but resulted in a 20% drop in traffic. Aberdeen Group surveyed 160 companies and discovered that, on average, slowing down a site by just one second results in a 7 percent reduction in conversions. To express this in dollar terms, for a site that earns $100,000 a day, a one-second slowdown results in $2.5 million of lost revenue per year.

Making websites faster is attainable. When creating responsive, high-performance web sites can’t—and shouldn’t—go about achieving that goal by optimizing every single piece of code as they write it. The opposite is true: one should optimize only what isn’t fast enough. The key is in establishing a balance between the browser and the server and therefore it is vital to define exactly what is “fast enough” in context of your application.

If your company doesn’t have someone focused on performance, appoint us for that role.