So OK – the name’s not fantastic but let’s look past that. There’s been much written recently about website speed and how it relates to revenue. Recently Google added page load times into their page rank algorithm, YSlow is a well used resource and Aptimize is betting on “the need for speed” being monetizable. Commonly recounted quotes are that Google has stated that a half-second delay in load time results in a 20% drop in ad revenue, while Amazon has found that a 1/10 second delay causes a 1% drop in sales. Into this fray jumps Zoompf, a company whose aim is to give organizations a deep view into the issues affecting the speed of their site.
I spoke with Zoompf founder, Billy Hoffman, to get an idea about what they’re launching and to also hear about a report they’re releasing to coincide with their launch. The inaugural State of Web Performance report, ranks and details the performance of the top 1000 web sites, as measured by Alexa site traffic.
Along with the report, Zoompf is unveiling its new Web Performance SaaS Offering, the Zoompf Web Performance Optimizer (WPO), that they’re saying will help companies speed up Web performance and increase revenue from their online applications. Hoffman showed me a trial report they ran for CloudAve.com – the report lists dozens of areas for improvement and offers suggestions for remedial work that could be undertaken. But, and here’s the problem, most web users wants a widget that they can bolt on somewhere that’ll keep optimizing their site for them. Information as to why a site is slow is all very useful, but for me I’d always prefer a tool that told me what it’s done to improve my speed.
I put this to Hoffman who countered with the assertion that in this aggregated world where so many people are accumulating multiple content types from different sources, the reality is that any tool that seeks to “solve the problems” as part of its offering will, by definition, be so generic as to limit the total gains to be made from website optimization. While I see his point, as a non technical admin of multiple web properties – I want to flick the switch on something than will both analyze and solve speed issues – for the moment Aptimize does that and Zoompf does not.