I’m a big fan of SumoMe’s Scroll Box functionality – it’s a non-invasive method of collecting emails for your site – and I’ve yet to find a good alternative version of it.
Today I was looking at the possibility of adding SumoMe to an Amazon Affiliate niche site I run. But one big conern I have is the affect on page load time. If the page takes too long to load, users will get bored and go elsewhere. Essentially attention spans are low, and need to catered for.
Below I ran some benchmarks on this blog to see how the site loads before and after adding the SumoMe Javascript snippet.
- In a nutshell, you’re looking at ~594KB extra in page size, and 10 extra external resource requests.
Test 1 – Firefox Browser + London Server
Test 2 – Chrome Browser + Dallas Server
Test 3 – Chrome Browser + Dallas Server (with blog post URL rather than homepage URL)
From my end, what this means is I need to shave off around 594KB in page size & 10 external requests before adding SumoMe.
Otherwise I risk collecting emails, at the expense of losing site visitors due to slower page load.
Though it offers some great tools for conversion, speed is one of the cons of Sumo. You should think of the trade-off before taking a decision.