Will Site Performance Issues Effect Holiday Sales?

Cyber Monday is a bit too late to consider improving your web site performance… but the effects will likely not be felt greater than today.

Performance Points to Ponder

1. With most shoppers using broadband connections is site performance that important anymore?
2. How big of a factor is web site performance in the overall customer experience?

Here’s InstantROI’s take on it…

“Site performance matters in as much as it’s a distraction from the buying process”

With that premise in mind we turned to Yahoo Developer Network’s YSlow tool. YSlow is an awesome Firebug plugin for Firefox and does a great job of analyzing performance issues on a given web page and provides specific suggestions on how to improve performance. YSlow reports give an A to F letter grade and a performance score on a 1 to 100 scale.

Here’s how some of the major players for Cyber Monday ranked on their YSlow scores this afternoon:

As you can see, Yahoo! clearly feels many of these sites have some basic ‘blocking and tackling’ site performance best practices to implement.  The reports for each site are full of detailed recommendations. 

Source:  YSlow, Yahoo! Developer Network.

Comments?  What do you think?  Are these numbers bunk and site performance tuning doesn’t matter even on peak sales days like Cyber Monday… or do the web dessign / development teams of these companies have more work they can do?