1st W: How Fast Does a Website Need To Be?

Note: The above title is for an article which I am going to summerise in the following lines.


1. Introduction

In his article How Fast Does a Website Need To Be?,
Scott Barber - an active member of the international Performance Testing community and an experienced practitioner explained that there are no industry standards to answer this question. What we have to do is that we must analyze the site in terms of who the customers are, what their needs are, where they are located, what their equipment and connection speed might be, etc., etc.

2. Considerations Affecting Performance Expectations

2.1. User Psychology which depends on:

1. The response time that users have become accustomed to based on previous experience.
2. Another factor is activity type. All users understand that it takes time to download an MP3 or MPEG video, and therefore have more tolerance if they’re aware that that’s the activity they’re performing.
3. This leads us to the factor of how user expectations have been set. If users know what to expect, as they do with the tax preparation system I use, they’re likely to be more tolerant of response times they might otherwise think of as slow. If you tell users that the system will be fast and then it isn’t, they won’t be happy. If you show users how fast it will be and then follow through with that level of performance, they’ll generally be pretty happy.
4. The last factor we should discuss here is what I call surfing intent. When users want to accomplish a specific task, they have less tolerance for poor performance than when they’re casually looking for information or doing research.

2.2. System Considerations

System considerations include the following:
1. system hardware
2. network and/or Internet bandwidth of the system
3. geographical replication
4. software architecture

2.3. Usage Considerations

Usage considerations are related to but separate from user psychology. The usage considerations I’m referring to have to do with the way the Web site or Web application will be used. For example, is the application a shopping application? An interactive financial planning application? A site containing current news? An internal human resources data entry application? "Fast" means something different for each of these different applications.