Load and performance testing your website is important. Tuning it can have more than a 1,000% return on investment.
Some of the case studies referenced below show us that we can improve revenue 219% just by improving performance our site. Other data confirms that the average business loses $4,100 per hour when their site slows down under load. An outage costs $21,000 per hour on average. Retailers can lose $100,000 per hour.
It’s possible to have a successful ad campaign or a wonderful Slashdot day that your site can’t handle – and that can send
46.9% of your traffic to your competitors. Or worse, cost you 150,000 customers.
Take Web Performance Seriously
At the beginning of 2009, Denny’s made a bold marketing move. At a time when many Americans were out of work, and those with jobs were struggling to make ends meet, the restaurant chain cut an ad offering every American a free breakfast. The ad only aired once, during a little event called the Super Bowl.
And that’s when Denny’s troubles began.
Within minutes of the ad airing, customers who attempted to access Denny’s Web site to get their free meal coupons found that they couldn’t get through. The company planned the commercial and the $3 million ad buy perfectly. What it didn’t plan for was the ensuing deluge of traffic, which Internet marketing expert Rob Kmiec estimates represented anywhere between a 434% and 1,700% spike in the daily traffic to dennys.com. Had the company planned for the additional attention and invested in a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or cloud network to handle the ensuing load, Kmiec argues, it would have reaped nearly a 1,000% return on that investment. Instead, the company lost the opportunity to serve an additional 153,300 customers.
Denny’s problems illustrate the importance of load and performance testing a site or application architecture in advance of a known event, such as a giveaway, sale, or holiday. As one commentator put it, a site outage is equivalent to a brick-and-mortar business hanging a “Closed” sign on its door. With a small investment in a load testing service, companies can avoid losing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue due to traffic spikes.
Despite the outage, the Grand Slam Breakfast offer was still a financial boon for Denny’s. Outages can be much more costly for retailers whose Web sites also serve as points-of-sale. Keynote used measurements of one prominent online retailer’s site traffic to estimate that site outages and slowdowns can cost a retailer up to $100,000 for every hour that the site is unavailable. TRAC Research’s broader survey still produced some big numbers, with TRAC estimating that the average business loses $4,100 per every hour of slow Web site performance, and an average of $21,000 per hour of total downtime.
Can Your Site Handle the Load of Success?
Companies who are proactive about performance may end up earning revenue they didn’t even realize they were losing. Supreme School Supply, an online retailer of forms and record books for teachers, saw an astounding 219% revenue increase when it used performance testing to reduce its average page load time from 4.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds.
Not everyone, unfortunately, is as far-sighted as Supreme School Supply. Other companies have seen their Web sites blink out under the weight of a special event. JetBlue’s Web site went down intermittently in 2010 in response to a one-day sale, where customers could purchase tickets for as little as $29. (The red-faced JetBlue never released any data assessing the financial impact of this outage). In 2008, apparel retailer Debenhams failed to anticipate a sales rush on its Web site, which crashed its servers for two days. Within three days, Debenhams was losing 46.9% of its downstream traffic to its competitors.
Nothing could be worse for an online florist than to experience an outage on Valentine’s Day. And yet, when the site Pingdom measured the performance of several major Internet flower retailers this year, it found that at last three major retailers experienced significant slowdowns due to a last-minute sales rush on February 14th. The rush took down floral retailer 1800flowers.com for a full four hours on Valentine’s Day. Talk about lousy timing!
These examples all have something in common: they were unnecessary. These were all planned or anticipated events. All of these retailers knew they would experience high traffic on these days. Had the companies stress tested their servers and networks beforehand, they could have added extra capacity and tweaked site performance to handle the added stress. No one makes this point better than Marks & Spencer (M&S), a direct competitor of Debenhams. M&S offered its own pre-Christmas sale at the same time as its rival. But the M&S site engineers apparently anticipated the rush and added extra server capacity, enabling the site to remain operational while its competitor went south.
Web Performance has Significant ROI
These are only a few instances in which adequate performance and stress testing could have netted a company additional revenue. When it comes to load testing, too many companies are still penny-wise and pound-foolish: by refusing to spend a few hundred or few thousand dollars testing their existing server capacity, each company lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue.
Is it worth the risk to skip performance testing your website? What would happen if you got a favorable write-up today on a social media network and 100,000 people clicked a link that brought them to your home page? If you are an “average business”, then you probably lost a bunch of money unless you take web performance seriously.
Wouldn’t you like to increase revenue? Avoid outage? Be prepared by load testing you web properties immediately.