Google apparently ran a test where they increased the number of search results on a page from 10 to 30. Because that’s what users wanted. The result? A 20% drop in clickthroughs and ad revenue. The reason? Fetching those extra twenty results increased the load time of the search results page from 0.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds. So that is something very interesting to keep in mind – half a second delay will cost you 20% in lost revenue! If there’s interest, I might do a post on increasing your Apache web server speed in the future.
