Web performance is everywhere. People intuitively understand that when a site is slow, something’s wrong. Web performance breeds anecdotal tales of lost carts, broken catalogs, and searches gone wrong. Web performance can get you name in lights, but not in the way you or your company would like.

It’s a mistake to consider Web performance a technology problem. Web performance is really a business problem that has a technological solution.
Business problems have solutions that any mid-level executive can understand. A site that can’t handle the amount of traffic coming in requires tuning and optimization, not the firing of the current VP of Operations and a new marketing strategy.

Can you imagine the fate of the junior executive who suggested that a new marketing strategy was the solution to brick-and-mortar stores that are too small and crowded to handle the number of prospective customers (or former prospective customers) coming in the door?

Every Web performance event costs a company money, in the present and in the future. So when someone presents your company with the reality of your current Web performance, what is your response?

Some simple ideas for living with the reality that Web performance hurts business.

  1. Be able to explain the issue to everyone in the company and to customers who ask. Gory details and technical mumbo-jumbo make people feel like there is something being hidden from them. Tell the truth, but make it clear what happened.
  2. Do not blame anyone in public. A great way to look bad to everyone is to say that someone else caused the problem. Guess what? All that the people who visited your site during the problem will remember is that your site had the problem. Save frank discussions for behind closed doors.
  3. Be able to explain to the company what the business cost was. While everyone is pointing fingers inside your company, remind them that the outage cost them $XX/minute. Of course, you can only tell them that if you know what that number is. Then gently remind everyone that this is what it cost the whole company.
  4. Take real action. I don’t mean things like “We will be conducting an internal review of our processes to ensure that this is not repeated”. I mean things like listening and understanding what technology or business process failed and got you into this position in the first place. Was it someone just hitting the wrong switch? Or was it a culture of denial that did not allow the reality of Web performance to filter up to levels where real change could be implemented?
  5. Demand quantitative proof that this will never happen again. Load test. Monitor. Measure. Correlate data from multiple sources. Decide how Web performance information will be communicated inside your company. Make the data available so people can ask questions. Be prepared to defend your decisions with real information.

The most successful Web companies have done thing very well. It is the core of their success and it is what makes them ruthlessly strive for Web performance excellence.

These companies understood that in order to succeed they needed to create a culture where business performance and Web performance are the same thing.