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Discussion on: When Do You Say A Website is Fast?

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bezpowell profile image
BezPowell

I think comparing different kinds of websites together not necessarily being a fair comparison is a really good point.

We do have to be careful of only comparing our own websites to similar ones, however, as you could get into a trap of certain kinds of sites caring less / more about performance that way: if all your competitors are serving unoptimized, slow pages to visitors, then their might not be much incentive to increase performance, even if it would be beneficial to visitors.

E-commerce sites seem to be particularly guilty of this. Many that I have seen don't bother with even basic optimizations and serve lots of tracking scripts and social media integrations that slow things down; they don't need to worry about losing customers to their competition because of this, as all their competitor's sites are the same.

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neomaxzero profile image
Maximiliano

There is always a trade-off on doing any comparison at all. The problem is not being aware of those. I do agree that 3rd party scripts (especially tracking ones) are a problem for all websites. Very easily sometimes we include them compromising performance and many times privacy terms.