It’s reasonable to assume that a website’s loading time is important.

We can confidently conclude that slow sites have usability and SEO issues because we know that users hate waiting for web pages to load and that Google uses site speed as a factor for its search rankings.

But, quantitatively, what are the other effects of having a slow website?

Let us look at some cases of tech companies sharing what they have learned about web optimization.

Case Study: Amazon

While discussing his work on Big Data in a presentation (PDF or see a report here) Greg Linden shared the significance of site speed in terms of revenue.

In his work at Amazon — Linden, by the way, invented Amazon’s recommendation engine — he talked about how only a 100-millisecond delay could lead to revenues of the online company dropping by 1%.

Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin calculations.

Last year alone, Amazon’s estimated revenue totaled $74.5 billion.

Based on Linden’s disclosure, increasing page loading times by just a fraction of a second would cost Amazon $745 million a year in lost revenue!

Case Study: Bing

In a joint conference presentation, Eric Schurman (from Bing) and Jake Brutlag (from Google) discussed the impact of web server delays.

Bing performed an experiment testing to see what would happen if their pages loaded 1.5 seconds longer than usual.

The results?

Source

Among other key metrics, they saw decreases in:

• User satisfaction (-3.8%)
• Revenue per user (-4.3%)
• Number of clicks (-4.4%).

Case Study: Akamai

Akamai is a longstanding industry leader in the content delivery space.

In 2009, the company conducted a survey research study involving over 1,000 online shoppers.

This is what they discovered:

• The threshold is 2 seconds — more than that and the user will become impatient
• 40% of the respondents will abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load

These stats all equate to one thing: Considerable amount of losses in revenue.

Case Study: Google

In a talk, Marissa Mayer — then a VP at Google and today Yahoo’s CEO — discussed an experiment (video) she and her team ran on Google’s search results page.

They tested the effects of displaying more results in Google searches: 10 search results vs. 30 search results.

Analyzing their data, they witnessed 25% fewer searches from users that saw more search results.

Source

But was it because displaying more results meant users found what they were looking for on the first search results page, and so they felt no need to perform additional searches?

After further investigation, they attributed this drop in searches (i.e. page impressions) to increased page load times.

On average, the group that had more search results were subjected to longer page response times (0.9 seconds) vs. the group with fewer search results but got the page loaded quicker at only 0.4 seconds.

In conclusion, Google discovered that even a few milliseconds of delay — just 500ms to be exact — could lead to a notable reduction in page impressions.

Case Study: Shopzilla

A few years ago, Shopzilla embarked on a major, two-year-long redesign of their site.

During this time, Shopzilla was already huge — they received between 20-29 million unique visitors a month and 8,000 searches per second. Optimizing website performance to handle this sort of traffic thus became crucial.

Their web optimization efforts led to significant improvements — up to a 5-second reduction in page-loading times.

Phil Dixon, VP of Engineering at Shopzilla shared data and the lessons the company learned during their optimization efforts.

They witnessed amazing growth in important metrics by improving their website’s speed:

• Conversion rates increased by 7-12%
• Page views increased by 25% — just imagine how much more page views they gained just by focusing on improving site speed, because they were already getting 100 million impressions per day

Case Study: AOL

While sharing some key metrics, David Artz — Director of Website Optimization at AOL and the co-author of the book Website Optimization – concluded that:

"Visits experiencing the fastest load times delivered us [AOL] the most page views per visit"

Source

This was because in the sections of AOL.com tested, they saw up to a 160% increase in average number of page views from users in the group who were in the top 10% in terms of average load time (fastest experience), compared to those at the bottom 10% (slowest experience).

Conclusion

These studies impart upon us one important lesson: Website speed should be a high priority if we want to build great websites.

Based on these reports, we have evidence suggesting that having a slow website will have negative effects on revenue, conversion rates, usability, and UX.

How to Speed Up Your Website

If you feel that your site’s speed needs improvement, read these articles to get started:

• 10 Ways to Improve Your Web Page Performance
• 20 Free Online Tools for Website Speed Testing
• 10 Tips for Optimizing Your Website’s Speed
• 10 Tips for Decreasing Web Page Load Times
• 8 Excellent WordPress Caching Plugins to Speed Up Your Site

Read Also

• 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies
• 5 Usability Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
• Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness
• Agile Web Development That Works

About the Author

Smriti Chawla works at Visual Website Optimizer,a popular A/B testing and heat-mapping tool. Read more articles on A/B testing and high-converting design ideas by visiting the Visual Website Optimizer Blog. Connect with Smriti on Twitter.

The post Why Website Speed is Important appeared first on Six Revisions.

With the recent developments in online privacy it is just about the right time to suggest small tweaks to improve your terms & conditions and privacy policy documents on your own websites. As the examples below show, there are various ways to make these documents (in addition to its legal validity) more than just text in a way that will benefit your visitors.

But wait, before we start, you might want to know why this is even relevant? Why do websites (and apps) need a privacy policy and terms of service? And what do you usually include in those documents?

For one, privacy policies are relevant (and legally required) in most countries—they are a way to disclose your data collection practices. (Did you know that you are required to have a privacy policy when you use Google Analytics?) It is also the right thing to do according to your visitors/customers: MEF’s Global Privacy Report from early 2013 revealed that 70% of consumers say it’s important to know exactly what personal information is being collected and shared.

Terms of Service can mainly help you to avoid responsibility for the actions of your users. They are therefore an important way of helping you stay out of trouble.

Here’s what’s usually is covered by a Terms & Conditions document:

• Disambiguation/definition of key words and phrases
• User rights and responsibilities
• Proper or expected usage; potential misuse
• Accountability for online actions, behavior, and conduct
• Privacy: pointing to the privacy policy and defining as part of the contract
• Privacy policy outlining the use of personal data
• Payment details such as membership or subscription fees, etc.
• Opt-out policy describing procedure for account termination, if available
• Disclaimer/Limitation of Liability clarifying the site’s legal liability for damages incurred by users
• User notification upon modification of terms, if offered

Here’s what usually needs to be included in a Privacy Policy:

• What kind of personal data is being collected
• Describe how this information will be used by the company
• Describe how this information will be transferred to third party companies
• Provide instructions on how users can modify or delete their personal information
• Provide instructions on how users can opt-out of future communications
• Identify its effective date and outline how you notify people of material changes to your privacy policy

Case Studies

Sprout Social — summary on top

I couldn’t find this User Agreement at Sprout Social anymore (taken from my archives), but the screenshot is self-explanatory. Above the actual user agreement, the most important points were summarized in an easily digestible manner.

FullContact — summarize/hide

Here’s a similar approach by FullContact, they summarize the actual content and hide it. If you want to learn more, the full text appears.

Mite — summary by paragraph

Mite’s terms of service and privacy policy summarize every paragraph by saying stated briefly what the legal speak means in plain English.

MailChimp — helpful definitions

MailChimp adds helpful definitions next to their paragraphs. They add information to the reading flow when something isn’t necessarily understandable for an average user.

The example below is MailChimp’s paragraph requiring you to comply with local and international laws like spam and privacy regulation. They explain the abbreviation EEA to clarify what their terms mean to you: “This applies to people who are sending to or from the European Economic Area. The EEA includes countries that are part of the European Union, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.”

Fragmentation

Moving on, but staying with Mailchimp. When doing your docs online, try to avoid putting everything in one document and group them by topic. Most importantly a privacy policy shouldn’t be buried in something like the terms or legal information regarding your company (required in a lot of European countries. In Spain they call it aviso legal, in Germany impressum).

Mailchimp’s way of grouping the legal documents, making it easy for you to understand where to look and what to expect.

Here’s a similar grouping implementation by Dropbox:

iubenda — icons/simplified and full legal text view

iubenda has a full system for their privacy policies. They combine an easily digestible view for visitors where the focus is on quick understanding and text is accompanied by icons with a page that shows actual legally relevant text. (Full disclosure: I have recently joined iubenda which is why I have insights into how they work. A lot of emphasis is put on ease of use for both web designers using the service and the visitors reading the policies).

Upworthy — use an infographic image

Use an infographic style image to explain what your users are to expect from you. This one has no real legal validity, but they additionally have one that may have below that image:

DuckDuckGo — tell a story

DuckDuckGo’s example is far away from being an actual privacy policy. What they did here is set themselves apart from the competition by telling a story and therefore outline what their privacy policy is all about. Again, they also have an actual policy on their site that complies with actual legal regulations. To make this stand out even more as a story, this policy sits on a separate site called donttrack.us.

CloudFlare — track changes on Github

CloudFlare tracks their changes on Github, so you can always see how the policies may have changed. Often a policy just shows the date of its latest startup. This is a great way of improving transparency and therefore trust.

What makes great legal documentation on the web isn’t just legally compliant text for your particular audience. It’s also easily understandable language and helps the user comprehend what it’s all about in a visual fashion. Hopefully this post will give you some ideas about how to design your documents in the future.

Featured image/thumbnail, legal checks image via Shutterstock.

Noem9studio’s Essay Font Family, 8 Styles – only $9!

The Affordable Care Act deadline has come and gone.  Now what?

If you are one of those citizens who didn’t get your act together to sign up for an insurance plan by March 31st, the your wallet will suffer the consequences (ie.penalties). There are, however, some exceptions to this deadline that you can see here.

With a initial goal of 7 million new enrollees, President Obama declared in the Rose Garden that 7.1 million Americans had signed up for new health plans through federal exchanges. 

Obama announced,

“This law is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s working. It’s helping people from coast to coast.”

Despite numerous technical errors and a messy rollout, President Obama defended his bill saying it has already improved health care for millions of Americans. 

As of Monday, 80% to 90% have already paid their premiums. 

All these numbers are encouraging to ACA supporters particularly considering its disasterous launch which led the Congressional Budget Office to predict only 6 million people would enroll. 

Many analysts are saying the young population helped the ACA in its late surge across the finish line.  They point to President Obama’s appearances on “Between Two Ferns” and LeBron James’ endorsement video as two effective campaign moments.

Regardless of this current success, the coming months ahead are sure to be bumpy. There are still many unanswered questions about the future of the ACA.

What question do you have?

Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said: “Compassion does not enter into anything without beautifying it, and is not removed from anything without making it ugly.” (Muslim)

The Prophet (saw) was a man who showed compassion to EVERY living being especially orphan children and those with special needs. Now who wouldn’t want to beautify their souls and the souls of those around them by showing this same compassion?

Join the MSA on Wednesday, April 2nd, insha’Allah from 11 AM – 2 PM in the QUAD for “Open Worship”. This will be a special edition of our weekly open spaces discussion as it will be open to the entire public (Great Da’wah!) and led by the honorable Sister Madiha Tahseen-Hammad, a student pursuing her PhD in Psychology. The topic of this interactive discussion will be the importance of showing compassion to orphan children and those with special needs. Afterwards, we will be praying Salatul Dhuhr in congregation on the quad! Don’t miss out on this awesome conversation and opportunity to give da’wah!

Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is the first smartphone that can use a fingerprint to authorize payments in stores and online.

Anyone with an iPhone 5 can use its fingerprint reader to unlock the device and pay for apps or music in Apple’s iTunes store. Owners of Samsung’s latest flagship device, the Galaxy S5 smartphone, which launches on April 11, will be able to make much broader use of their fingerprints to pay for things. If they visit a website or app that accepts PayPal using the device, they can authorize payments by swiping a finger across the phone’s home button. And PayPal’s own mobile app can be used to pay for goods in some physical stores in the U.S.

Sencha is providing a team based meet and greet for the folks behind the Breakthrough Platform for Managing and Securing Mobile HTML5 Apps over at their booth in this year’s Interop 2014 being held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas Nevada Today and tomorrow the 2^nd.