Howdy perfers! December is an easy month to stay on top of web performance news because the Performance Calendar is the gift that keeps giving all month. The first entry is a great one from calendar curator Stoyan Stefanov. He conducts some user research via the power of search engine autocomplete.
By doing some unfinished searches like “why is my website so…” Stoyan shows that no matter which giant web property you’re talking about, one of the most common complaints will be that it’s slow. It’s pretty telling that this complaint spans across Facebook, Yahoo, and even Google who makes a very public show of serving fast pages. We all have our work cut out for us!
Reading the comments a few good points are brought up about the initial search query and other factors like the extensions each user has installed (not to mention the tendency for humans to complain more than compliment), but I think the consistency across the searches says something about the basic expectations of users on the web.
Keep checking the Performance Calendar each day in December for more web performance tips!
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