An acceptable 2s load time on Wifi might turn into 2 minutes on Edge.
You might say, 95% of our customers have 3G, to which I'll reply, 100% of your customers sometimes don't have 3G.
And when your page takes a minute to load, it doesn't matter what your time to market was, because noone will look at it.
When your news website is sluggish every time I'm on the train, I'll stop reading it, and do something else, like browse hacker news, which is always fast.
Exactly. I'm at my parents' house, where there is only EDGE, and only if the wind goes in the right direction. :)
The supposedly "fastest web page" took 13 seconds to download and render, and that's really good compared to the rest. HN is slightly faster, but probably due to cached assets.
Have you never tried to browse the internet on a crowded hotel wifi, or on a train, or in the mountains? When you have network latencies measured in seconds and a bandwith of a few KB, one minute page load times are nothing special.
Most people just give up in those cases and think they have no signal. But it's not true: That bandwidth would be absolutely sufficient to transfer a few tweets or a newspaper article. It's just the bloated ad-tech infested websites used to serve the content that are breaking down.
Because mobile.
An acceptable 2s load time on Wifi might turn into 2 minutes on Edge.
You might say, 95% of our customers have 3G, to which I'll reply, 100% of your customers sometimes don't have 3G.
And when your page takes a minute to load, it doesn't matter what your time to market was, because noone will look at it.
When your news website is sluggish every time I'm on the train, I'll stop reading it, and do something else, like browse hacker news, which is always fast.