For 24 years, Jade Wong ran a vegan restaurant in New York, called ‘Red Bamboo’. Her business did not grow as fast as rent increased. Also, her foot traffic declined, as you can read here. In other words: business was decreasing.

This was strange, because Billie Eilish publicly named it her favorite place to eat and her website was being featured on Wix, one of the biggest website platforms. If Billie Eilish and Wix promote you, how can you still fail? Impossible, right?

Well… her homepage required 320 requests and was 30 MB large. While it seemed to load fine on broadband, it would take up to 35 seconds to become interactive on 4G. On a slower connection it would take even longer. Because the whole page became unresponsive while loading, you would have to wait the full 30+ seconds to open and view the menu. By that time all hangry potential customers (with a slower connection) would have already left. A typical Wix problem, which is perfectly fixable.

My educated guess is that this must have cost her around 50% of all potential customers, who of course never became returning customers either and could not refer the restaurant to others. This resulted in a consistent decline (instead of growth) of customers, which eventually killed her business. I am quite confident that if her website had worked, she would still be in business today. In fact, I think that she would have expanded and opened more Red Bamboo restaurants.

PS. I also think that Wix owes Jade a significant amount of money in damages, but I am not a lawyer.

()  Joost van der Schee