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Application Performance as a KPI for e-Business

Sven Hammar

Web application load times can make the difference between your e-business thriving or dying. Speedy load times are so essential to a web application’s success that they should be considered a key performance indicator.

Comparing sales data with performance data establishes a direct relationship between the two: A platform that performs faster will lead to higher sales. On the flip side, the damage can be significant when performance takes a hit. Amazon found that a 100ms increase in page load latency translates to a 1 percent drop in sales.

Customer Patience: Conversion vs. Speed

Performance is an often overlooked KPI. According to a study presented at Velocity 2013, each second of reduced load time between 15 and 7 seconds results in a 3 percent conversion rate increase, and each second between 7 and 5 seconds results in a 2 percent conversion hike.

In financial terms, a 100ms load time reduction can boost revenue by up to 1 percent. According to CA Technologies, most users will abandon an application if the load time is longer than six seconds. Sales come to a dead stop when the platform goes down or jumps to double-digit load times.

A theoretical example (by Apica) found that a business bringing in about $800,000 in weekly revenue will experience a total loss in revenue during an outage or a plummet in performance. While the revenue rate sees a brief 20 percent hike when the platform returns to service, it is not enough to compensate for the outage losses. Furthermore, when the example platform returned, it experienced load times of 10+ seconds — so the platform missed additional sales due to customer abandonment. Online sales can see as much as a 10 percent drop in revenue when performance is lacking due to visitor spikes.

SEO Impact: Google Rankings

Search engines including Google tend to favor websites that load faster over ones that load slower. So, if your site runs slower, you’ll be bringing in less traffic from search engines. However, content quality is still the most important metric, so slow load times should be treated as an opportunity for improvement rather than a reason to panic.

Establishing Relationships: Brand Impact

Load times also play into the brand loyalty KPI for application performance. Slow load times have a negative effect on brand recognition through a phenomenon called “web stress.” Waiting for a page to load is a stressful event, and continuously experiencing that stress causes an increasingly negative customer reaction to your brand.

Adding a mere half second to load times generates a 26 percent increase in frustration and an 8 percent decrease in engagement (Radware). Even if your application far outweighs the competition, people who use it will remember it as “the slow one” if it has long response times.

The Good News

There is no need to test your infrastructure on a live, unsuspecting audience. Professional advanced load testing platforms provide the means to understand how well your web applications perform under real-life end-user demands. These platforms simulate millions of concurrent, virtual users, helping your business plan and establish the best infrastructure for fast load times to meet both current and future demand.

Maximize profitability by providing a service fast enough to capitalize on conversions without overspending on unnecessary infrastructure.

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Application Performance as a KPI for e-Business

Sven Hammar

Web application load times can make the difference between your e-business thriving or dying. Speedy load times are so essential to a web application’s success that they should be considered a key performance indicator.

Comparing sales data with performance data establishes a direct relationship between the two: A platform that performs faster will lead to higher sales. On the flip side, the damage can be significant when performance takes a hit. Amazon found that a 100ms increase in page load latency translates to a 1 percent drop in sales.

Customer Patience: Conversion vs. Speed

Performance is an often overlooked KPI. According to a study presented at Velocity 2013, each second of reduced load time between 15 and 7 seconds results in a 3 percent conversion rate increase, and each second between 7 and 5 seconds results in a 2 percent conversion hike.

In financial terms, a 100ms load time reduction can boost revenue by up to 1 percent. According to CA Technologies, most users will abandon an application if the load time is longer than six seconds. Sales come to a dead stop when the platform goes down or jumps to double-digit load times.

A theoretical example (by Apica) found that a business bringing in about $800,000 in weekly revenue will experience a total loss in revenue during an outage or a plummet in performance. While the revenue rate sees a brief 20 percent hike when the platform returns to service, it is not enough to compensate for the outage losses. Furthermore, when the example platform returned, it experienced load times of 10+ seconds — so the platform missed additional sales due to customer abandonment. Online sales can see as much as a 10 percent drop in revenue when performance is lacking due to visitor spikes.

SEO Impact: Google Rankings

Search engines including Google tend to favor websites that load faster over ones that load slower. So, if your site runs slower, you’ll be bringing in less traffic from search engines. However, content quality is still the most important metric, so slow load times should be treated as an opportunity for improvement rather than a reason to panic.

Establishing Relationships: Brand Impact

Load times also play into the brand loyalty KPI for application performance. Slow load times have a negative effect on brand recognition through a phenomenon called “web stress.” Waiting for a page to load is a stressful event, and continuously experiencing that stress causes an increasingly negative customer reaction to your brand.

Adding a mere half second to load times generates a 26 percent increase in frustration and an 8 percent decrease in engagement (Radware). Even if your application far outweighs the competition, people who use it will remember it as “the slow one” if it has long response times.

The Good News

There is no need to test your infrastructure on a live, unsuspecting audience. Professional advanced load testing platforms provide the means to understand how well your web applications perform under real-life end-user demands. These platforms simulate millions of concurrent, virtual users, helping your business plan and establish the best infrastructure for fast load times to meet both current and future demand.

Maximize profitability by providing a service fast enough to capitalize on conversions without overspending on unnecessary infrastructure.

Hot Topics

The Latest

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...