DEV Community

Cover image for How much money do you lose for every second it takes to load your web application?
rubenofen for Nimbel

Posted on • Originally published at nimbel.net

How much money do you lose for every second it takes to load your web application?

Did you know that most people who have a profitable business idea, fail miserably just because they not make a reasonable investment in their sales tool?

This is absolutely true and we have done an experiment in which it is confirmed that an incorrect decision can make you lose thousands of euros.

Many times when we create a business, we realize that one of the most important sales channels is the internet and at that moment we decide to create our own web application.

Usually we have to take many decisions and make important investments in different areas so that our product or service goes ahead.

The first problem we face when creating the web application is:
**How many technologies do we have available and what are their costs?

One of the technologies that entrepreneurs usually use is a CMS such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, this is a very flexible solution and *quite good.

It allows the entrepreneur to manage their own content, maintain it and modify it, in addition many companies offer to provide hosting or hosting for Wordpress with everything pre-configured.

Alt Text

There are also many developers of these CMS's that offer their services at a very competitive price...but...

This hides a deeper problem that can turn the business into a ruin. **You have to take into account the user's behavior.

According to a report from Deloitte, if your web application takes between 1 and 3 seconds to load the probability of bouncing increases by 32%, but if the loading time is in the range of 1 to 5 seconds, the probability of bouncing increases by up to 90% 😱.

Alt Text

And what is the probability of rebound?

It is considered a rebound when a user enters a website and without interacting with it closes it because he is not interested in what is on it.
This is quite normal, because it's impossible to attract only users who are interested in your product or service to your website.
And what effect does it have on the business to increase the likelihood of a bounce because it takes a few seconds to load?

The experiment

Let's make the following assumption:
An entrepreneur has a business where he sells a service or an article for 100 ?, of this article 50 ? are costs and the other 50 ? are benefits.

Sales price Costs Profit
100€ 50€ 50€

Let's imagine that you manage to attract 4,500 users per month and if your application loaded instantly that's how users would behave:

Visits % bounce users bounce Conversion ratio Profit per month
4.500 29% 1.305 2% 3.195€

In other words, of the total of 4,500 visits, 1,305 enter but instantly realize that they are not interested and leave without interacting and reading practically nothing.

For both scenarios we propose a web application that will be working for 3 years.

Scenario A

The entrepreneur hires the development of a wordpress because he is convinced by the budget and the solution is already quite good, "I don't need that much ".

Budget:

Development Plugins Hosting/month(VPS)
1.200€ 300€ 70€

Therefore: 1,200 + 300 + (70*3*12) = 4,020 in the 3 years

Scenario A

The entrepreneur hires the development of a wordpress because he is convinced by the budget and the solution is already quite good, "I don't need that much ".

Budget:

Development Plugins Hosting/month(VPS)
1.200€ 300€ 70€

Therefore: 1,200 + 300 + (70*3*12) = 4,020 in the 3 years

Result

We have obtained this result from one of our clients, who has his product developed in wordpress and has the page hosted in a quality VPS, obviously we hide his brand so as not to damage his image.
We will look at the First Contenful Paint, which is the time that passes from the request of the page until the first piece of content that appears on your screen, either an image, an icon or some text.
Alt Text

7 seconds 😱😨😰😥😓. If we look at Deloitte's graph, taking between 1 and 7 seconds to load means a 123% higher probability of rebound. And how do your business results look?

The original bounce was 1,305 users out of 4,500, by increasing the bounce probability by 123% we will have 2,910 users that will bounce without buying anything. With this you only have 1,519 possible buyers left. **At this point, we could evaluate the cost of having attracted traffic to your website, but we'll leave that for another article.

Numbers:

Visits Bounces Interested parties Conversion ratio Sales Monthly profit
4.500 2.910 1.590 2% 3.179,70€ 1.589,85€

Scenario B

The entrepreneur hires the JAMSTACK development a little more expensive but that has convinced him more, because he has been assured that his page will go at the speed of light and that will have a positive impact on his business. In addition, with the traffic that the hosting has, it is free.

Quotation:

Professional Designer Development Hosting/month(VPS)
1.200€ 4.000€ 0€

Therefore: 1,200 + 300 + (0*3*12) = 5,200 in the 3 years (if clearly 30% more expensive in the 3 years)

Let's see stage B

Here we expose our website directly, hosted in vercel.

Alt Text

If we look at the image, 0.9s 🧐🤓😎🥳😏, a priori, has no bounce percentage penalty so the numbers setting up a business with a page with the JamStack stack would look like this.

Visits Bounces Interested users Conversion ratio Sales Profit month
4.500 1.305 3.195 2% 6.390,00€ 3.195,00€

We believe that the difference is more than noticeable, between 1,589 and 3,195 there are 1,606
Have you thought what you can do with that extra money a month? The car of your dreams? The little house in the mountain? or even leave your job for good, if you are a part-time entrepreneur? **Those 1600 euros change everything.

What happened after 3 years?

Scenario A

Total benefits Web development Final result
57.234,60€ 4.020€ 53.214,60€

Scenario B

Total benefits Web development Final result
115.020,00€ 5.200€ 109.820,00€

Alt text

Image from StartupStockPhotos in Pixabay

That's more than 50,000 euros. Have you thought about what it costs you to win 50,000 euros to lose it because of a wrong decision?

Alt Text

In this experiment we have not taken into account the effect that having a professional designer who creates your own image and cares about the user experience, instead of using a template, can have. It's a summation and it goes on.

Remember: **Good enough makes you poor

Lucky you, at Nimbel we are experts in websites, high performance applications, mobile applications and everything that software technology has to offer.
Contact us and tell us what you want to do and we will offer you the solution that best fits your project. Your success is our mission.

Oldest comments (0)