We’ve progressed pretty far since 56k dial-up days; no more waiting for pages to load in order to access information, almost everything is immediately accessible via multi-megabyte per second internet connections. But we would be naive to think that there have not been growing pains. In the IT industry, high turnover is both frequent and expected due to the constantly changing environment. (The exception is highly specialized fields.) Improving technologies changes the needs of the people and their expectations.
Reading Percona’s Web Scaling Blog, I saw a page on Front End Performance which outlined why web developers need to be conscious of users.
Web Site Speed Affects your bottom line. [...] Amazon’s experiment: Slowing pages by 100ms decreased sales by 1%
Highly-available internet access shifted our needs to security and privacy, but now we expect websites to be uber-fast. As a web developer, I need to listen to the needs of the user. The studies presented here show that those who do not develop sites up to user expectations will not get the traffic and revenue they desire.
This argument is very similar to the business scenario of the credit card purchase. Using a credit card is convenient to users, and even though it presents cost to a business to accept credit card purchases, if they do not accept them, they will lose business because customers expect it. Also, if a business abuses the power of the credit card by throwing in additional charges that are unnecessary (or unethical) customers will either not make purchases or not return for additional business.
So while producing a high-performance website—or trimming an existing one—may be costly, it is an important gesture, and will probably pay off.