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Performance

Fun facts about the page speed of a website

If Amazon become 1 second slower it could cost them 1.6 billions dollars a year. That's 96 millions kilograms of premium ice cream. That amount of ice cream means that you and your future generations can enjoy a kilo of ice cream per day starting today and for the following 200 thousands years.
2 min read
Fun facts about the page speed of a website

Everybody, everywhere, all the time, is saying that page speed matters. We get it, we heard it a trillion times, and I'm not sure why we keep writing about it or discussing it.

Page speed matters as much as the sun is hot, period. If you are still in doubt then you're having a serious problem. Make your website faster, and do not argue this fact, as it will cost you money.

That disclaimer being made, you probably also read that Amazon run some test and found out that if their site become 1 second slower it could cost them 1.6 billions dollars a year. And that's 1.600.000.000 dollars.

How much is 1.600.000.000 dollars?

  • That's more than 133 millions dollars per month. An amount of money I probably never going to see in real life, at least not all together, whether you divide per months or even days (more than 4 millions a day).
  • In Argentina, that's 48 billions pesos considering the currency value by the time I'm writing this post.
  • That's 96 millions (just millions) kilograms of premium ice cream. That amount of ice cream means that you and your future generations can enjoy more than a kilo of ice cream per day starting today and for the following 200 thousands years.
  • If you buy an iPhone X, and iPad Pro, an Apple Watch Series 3... And then a MacBook Pro, an iMac Pro, an Apple TV... and finally an iPod Touch just because, you'll be spending around 20 thousands dollars meaning that for 200 years you can get yourself a brand new model of all this products everyday.
  • 320 millions Caramel Macchiato Venti from Starbucks.
  • A Magento Commerce licence could rise up to 125 thousands dollars per year based on expected annual gross sales revenue, meaning you can build 12800 new eCommerce websites using this platform.
  • The Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. legal battle you probably read on the Internet doesn't event get near this number. Wikipedia talks about 539 millions in favor of Apple for the first US trial, and then 120 millions for the second US trial. It was pointless to check the legal battles in the other countries.
  • And my home banking doesn't let me enter 1.600.000.000 in any form's input.

It was hard to find the real source of this 1.6 billions dollars proclamation, so I'm not sure about the veracity of such statement but for the end of this post it is not 100% relevant.

What I did find is that Greg Linder, best known as the inventor of Amazon's recommendations, made a presentation in 2006 saying the following:

Every 100ms delay costs 1% of sales.
Greg Linder

Probably somebody took that statement, and calculated it to be 1.6 billions dollars a year.

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