Just one second delay in delivering a web page can make a devastating impact on your online business.
Consider this: an item on an online auction site is easily viewed 300 times.
This means that a user in search of particular item could therefore view 300 items before making a choice.
If each of these views incurs an additional 1 second of delay, this will add 5 minutes to the total search. That is 5 whole minutes wasted. If you can choose between two shops where one lets you wait idling for 5 more minutes, which one do you choose?
Maybe this is why Google strives to perform really well, and in fact delivers its home page in 0.2 seconds on the average.