The Miami Herald published an ad for clothing congratulating the team on their 2011 NBA championship. Perhaps no one noticed. #FAIL

Whoops, I guess the editor wasn't watching the game when the Dallas Mavericks closed out the NBA Finals and took home the trophy. Congrats to the Mavs. Dirk earned the right to be in the greatest player discussions - especially when it applies to comebacks in the 4th quarter.

The huge mistake by the newspaper makes me think about how obvious web performance failure is a tremendous error. Perhaps a site owner or web application product manager can ignore the performance aspect, but their users will not. The speed and scalability of an online system has been proven statistically to directly affect its effectiveness.

Success for a site depends on performance. Take this recent testimonial published on the Strangeloop site:

"...after implementing Site Optimizer we ran a lengthy A/B test and immediately saw that, for the optimized pages, revenue per visit jumped by 8% and overall revenue grew by 6%." -- Michael Hervieux, Chief Operating Officer, Artbeads.com

Other more extensive studies have shown that revenue has a direct correlation to web performance. Web performance tuning can increase profit by 10% or more.

The conclusion is simple and straightforward:

Performance is important. Load test your web application today. Find out how it responds to traffic before you lose money.