When is Your Web Site Fast Enough?

When your business is your Web site, and site responsiveness affects customer satisfaction, how much to budget for improving site performance becomes an important business decision.

Companies doing business on the Web must manage both site availability and site responsiveness. It's relatively easy to justify spending money to ensure site reliability; when customers can’t reach your site, you're losing business. And even if you can’t assign a precise dollar cost to every outage, at least everyone understands why the ultimate goal is 100% availability, and why a 10% downtime record is likely to be ten times more damaging to the business than 1%.

A cost/benefit analysis of responsiveness is a lot trickier; how much should you invest in speeding up your site? Faster may be better, but how fast do you really need your site to be? And even if you have set a target, what is the cost of missing it? These are the harder questions facing eCommerce executives today.

I wrote about this topic last week in eCommerce Times. The article provides a short overview of a very important subject, which I plan to write more about in future posts.