Although you may be convinced of the importance of your website’s performance, there may be others who will need some convincing. For them, optimizing a website may seem to be something ‘nice to have,’ but not something worth spending additional time or resources on. In these cases, how do you make the case that improving you site’s performance is not just an expense, but an actual investment that will help the company’s bottom line?

In situations like these, having some case studies to point to can be quite valuable. If other reputable companies have experienced significant benefits—either monetarily or in other key metrics—from paying attention to performance, then it’s easier to make the case that your organization should too.

Selected Case Studies

Where do you go when you need to find some case studies? One great resource for staying finding relevant ones is WPO Stats. They currently have a few dozen links to case studies that are filterable by tags and years. Here are a few recent examples:

Zitmaxx Wonen (source)

Recognizing the role mobile plays for their consumers, furniture retailer Zitmaxx Wonen undertook a project to improve the speed and usability of their mobile site.

After identifying areas for potential improvement, they decided to first focus on the load time of their homepage. With some work, they were able to get it down to 3 seconds (significantly less than their average competitor). And since doing so, they have seen the following changes in key business metrics:

  • Mobile conversion rates have jumped to over 50%
  • Mobile revenue has increased by 98.7%

Pinterest (source)

As a result of rebuilding their pages for performance, Pinterest was able to reduce user wait time by 40%. This coincided with increases in the following metrics:

  • A 15% increase in SEO traffic
  • A 15% increase in conversion rate to signup

Missguided (source)

Fashion retailer Missguided saw a significant discrepancy between load times on Android and iOS. By removing selected 3rd party services, they were able to drop the median load time for their Android visitors by 4 seconds. In the weeks that followed they saw the following impact on revenue:

  • A 56% increase in revenue week-over-week from Week 0 to Week 9

Connecting the Dots

If given a choice between a fast site and a slow site, everyone will choose a fast site. But making a site fast can require time and resources, and sometimes the choice of whether or not to devote this time and money to performance is up to someone else.

In those cases, it’s up to us who care about performance to help connect the dots for these stakeholders, showing them that investing in performance can have a direct impact on the metrics they do care about. Because if they can be shown that an investment in performance will also be profitable in other ways, they’ll be more likely to go in that direction.

Case studies like the ones above are valuable in that they give real evidence of the impact of performance, and can go a long way in helping others see the value performance optimization can provide to the organization’s bottom line.

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