Yes, speed matters. This is just anecdotal evidence, so feel free to dismiss it:<p>We recently switched hosting companies and our site load speed went from an average of 10 seconds to the new server speed of just under 1 second.<p>Our monthly revenue instantly doubled. People stayed on our site longer, they learned more about our products, and thus were more willing to shell over their hard earned cash.
I think this is very important for web applications as well, not just for a page load time. Broadband may help with bandwidth, but latency remains the same.
I think it depends on what the site is being used for. If there is information on the site that I can't get anywhere else, I'd wait. However, if it's an online webapp with many similar competitors, speed is more likely to factor into my decision making.
Google is a champion speed and consider it a core-competency. I know that when building EveryMentor.com I did my best to keep it fast and lightweight and I am really proud of how responsive it feels. HTML requests are 260ms and after the initial jQuery/CSS caching, there are really few images to deal with either.<p>It feels blazing fast with Chrome and that is really important to me.
A lot of us have worked tabbed browsing into our workflow to a degree that the difference between 1 millisecond load time and a 5 second load time is negligible, since I'll spend enough time on the first tab to let the rest I've queued load up.<p>It's also worth noting that on mobile, the bottleneck is still the connection, not client or server side rendering.
I'll happily wait 20 seconds for gmail to load, since I'm not going to close it again until I reboot.<p>If I'm revisiting a site I know, I'll cut it some slack, and be pretty patient.<p>But.. if I'm picking off results from a search, the sites have mear moments before I hit that back button
Note that there is also an optimistic view on that issue. For instance, the same effect ensures that mobile phones aren't accepted to take too long to boot (compare their boot times to the 2-5 minutes which computers usually need). So I agree, it's all about what latency people are used to.