Downtime may grab headlines, but slow performance is the silent-but-deadly #1 enemy

From the blog of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

When I got back to my desk on Monday morning, I had not one, not two, but eight different emails from colleagues, sending me the same article about the Black Friday outages suffered by JC Penney and American Eagle.

I’m not surprised by this (the emails, I mean, not the outages). Spectacular site outages are the most visible form of IT failure, and, like car crashes, they get the most media attention.

But if we look at the results from Black Friday, while the spectacular car crashes of JC Penney and American Eagle may attract the attention, the real revenue killer is still site speed. But you won’t read headlines about this.

Site speed and site performance are not sexy and spectacular. It’s hard to get an editor excited about running a story with a headline like "An ecommerce site took 12 seconds to load from my house, so I got frustrated and went to a competitor."

Josh elaborates his point by comparing JCpenney.com with one of its competitors, Macys.com. To find out the results, read the full post at Web Performance Today.