To most people, AJAX is cool. They think of AJAX as something that will give their website a cool factor and add stickiness for customers. Some may see it as utility (say, the best way to do live chat on your website).
None of those things are wrong, but I think many people fail to see how AJAX can serve as a cost-saving device.
So I decided to crunched some numbers.
Let’s say that it takes 3 seconds per page reload on a particular back-end system for an eCommerce store on a shared host. That may not seem like much to a small business until you start to add up how that three seconds translates into dollars and cents over a period of time.
Let’s create a scenario that better explains the value of AJAX:
Suppose I have a small business with 5 employees, that spend an average of 20 hours per week on the system. Let’s say they will navigate to a new page every 20 seconds on average. If AJAX allow us to decrease the number of times my employees have to reload a page down to a third, that will save 104 page loads per hour. If it takes 3 seconds per reload, that’s 5 minutes and 12 seconds per hour wasted waiting for the system to load.
At this rate, each employee would waste 1 hour and 44 minutes a week and an astronomical 83 hours and 29 minutes in a year, at 48 weeks in a year. (That's more than 2 weeks working full time!) At a rate of $10/hr, that's $835 per year for one employee. If I have all five employees doing the same thing, I end up with 417 hours a year and a total of $4,174 spent above what I would spend if I had AJAX saving page loads.
When you look at this over the course of a year, it becomes clear that adding AJAX to your site can actually save you money, not just look cool. Even if you decide that a small amount of your budget should go towards AJAX, adding small amount of AJAX in the right parts of your system can offer big results.
So I decided to crunched some numbers.
Let’s say that it takes 3 seconds per page reload on a particular back-end system for an eCommerce store on a shared host. That may not seem like much to a small business until you start to add up how that three seconds translates into dollars and cents over a period of time.
Let’s create a scenario that better explains the value of AJAX:
Suppose I have a small business with 5 employees, that spend an average of 20 hours per week on the system. Let’s say they will navigate to a new page every 20 seconds on average. If AJAX allow us to decrease the number of times my employees have to reload a page down to a third, that will save 104 page loads per hour. If it takes 3 seconds per reload, that’s 5 minutes and 12 seconds per hour wasted waiting for the system to load.
At this rate, each employee would waste 1 hour and 44 minutes a week and an astronomical 83 hours and 29 minutes in a year, at 48 weeks in a year. (That's more than 2 weeks working full time!) At a rate of $10/hr, that's $835 per year for one employee. If I have all five employees doing the same thing, I end up with 417 hours a year and a total of $4,174 spent above what I would spend if I had AJAX saving page loads.
When you look at this over the course of a year, it becomes clear that adding AJAX to your site can actually save you money, not just look cool. Even if you decide that a small amount of your budget should go towards AJAX, adding small amount of AJAX in the right parts of your system can offer big results.