Why Slow Websites Lose Customers Fast: Lessons in Performance, Marketing, and Building for Scale

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some really cool companies through the years, from the coolest DTC (direct to consumer) brands in your feed to the largest Fortune 100 giants. They all shared a desire to grow their digital commerce businesses, and there is a consistent theme across the ones that did the best. Their websites were fast. Their customer journeys were clean. They cared about the experience of their community and over the years site performance has only become more important.

I joined the EcomOps podcast to talk about why milliseconds matter, what I’ve learned from building and exiting startups, and how Harper is helping enterprise brands deliver performant scalable digital experiences. Here are some of the key takeaways from that conversation.

From Founder to Harper: Lessons That Stick

Building companies is hard, and it’s important to try to learn something new each day. I’ve found that no matter what you’re building, the common thread is this: stay true to your founding principle and your community. Whether you're launching a nonprofit, a Shopify analytics tool, or a performance tech platform, if you put your customers first and build with conviction, value will follow.

I’ve known our founder Stephen for over 15 years, and every time we spoke about Harper I could tell that he, Fred, Kyle, and everyone on the team was building something special. Not only is the team incredible, but the platform is beyond transformational. I truly believe that this is technology that will be table-stakes in the next few years.

Building for Scale Isn’t Optional

Many of you have been there, with a viral marketing moment, or a BFCM sale, and websites crash under the weight of success. It’s not enough to have a good marketing campaign if your infrastructure can’t keep up. Harper helps companies avoid that nightmare by delivering performance that scales with demand.

Most of our customers are large-scale enterprises: think $100M+ in revenue, millions of pageviews per month, and product catalogs that stretch into the tens of millions of SKUs. These aren’t hobbyist brands. They’re teams with complex stacks, global traffic, and serious technical SEO needs. When their LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is too high, they come to us for help.

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Outcome-Driven Marketing Starts with the Right Questions

One of the biggest traps I see in ecommerce and B2B marketing is obsessing over ROAS (return on ad spend) as the sole success metric. If all you're looking for is a 3x ROAS, you're likely to give up too soon. Transformational marketing isn’t about quick wins but sustained actions. Great marketing thinks about customer value on a time frame that makes sense for your business (maybe 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months) and not just LTV, cash flow horizons, and where to invest for long-term return.

We often walk brands through a more holistic framework: What does a customer cost across each channel? What’s the 6- or 12-month LTV? Should you spend a little more upfront because your owned channels—email, SMS, and affiliates—create compounding returns later?

When you analyze your efforts uniformly, you can better allocate dollars, spot inefficiencies, and scale with confidence. And yes, make sure you’re tracking everything—whether it’s offline media, paid search, or a trade magazine ad. You can’t optimize what you don’t measure.

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Performance Is a Growth Channel

Core Web Vitals (CWV) aren’t just an indicator of how your website is performing, they should be KPIs that your business is trying to improve.

When customers come to Harper, it’s often because their page speed is costing them revenue. We’ve helped brands drop LCP from 2.5 seconds to 180 milliseconds consistently. Because Harper’s platform fuses database, messaging, API, and caching layers into a single in-memory process, it eliminates fundamental latency from your architecture. No handshakes, no latency from chaining services together, just a super fast, stable architecture to scale with.

Amazon famously stated that every 100 milliseconds of latency costs them 1% of revenue. If you're a $500M brand and you improve your load time by 2 seconds, that’s real money. CRO, SEO, paid media—all of it performs better when your site is lightning fast.

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Case in Point: Resilience in the Real World

Recently, a major retailer’s site went down for over an hour. But because they’d implemented Harper to serve cached versions of their most trafficked products, customers didn’t even notice. Transactions kept flowing, and they were actually interacting with a faster version of the site.

Imagine that happening on Black Friday. Make sure you’re preparing for the best possible customer experience even when your stack falters.

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How Fast Is Fast Enough?

Here’s the benchmark: you want an LCP under one second. Ideally under 800ms, based on field data (not lab data). That’s what gives you the edge in Google search, in shoppable ads, even in AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, which are becoming discovery engines in their own right. For enterprise customers even marginal gains here mean seismic revenue gains and SERP positional gains.

Why Storytelling Still Matters

At the end of the day, technology gets you in the door, but storytelling builds the relationship. Whether you’re selling sneakers or high-performance infrastructure, your story has to be real. It has to mean something.

Consumers are so numb to marketing these days by being inundated with instagram and Tik Tok stories all day. They’ve seen the “after 5 years of research we’ve finally perfected the t-shirt” a million times. So if your story is “we sell awesome, affordable t-shirts,” own it. Don’t try to make up a story that is fake. Authenticity is what cuts through the noise. And if you have a great story, tell it with video.

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One Last Thought

Someone once asked me early in my career: What’s something you’re going through now that feels like the biggest deal in the world, but years from now, you’ll look back and laugh? That question has stuck with me. It’s a reminder to keep perspective—because there’s always another moment to optimize, another performance gain to chase, and another story to tell and it can feel overwhelming a lot of the time. Take a moment and breath, and remember the the road to growth is bumpy but exciting.

Thanks for reading. If you want to see what Harper can do for your site speed, check out our performance simulator or drop us a line.

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