The importance of website performance
Allanki Srinivas (He/Him)
Passionate full-stack developer with a decade of experience. Always put the client’s needs first, to find a perfect balance between time, money, and functionality.
Why performance is important
None of us want to wait for websites to load. I’m pretty confident that all of us have closed a website because it was taking too long to load. That’s why performance matters.
Performance as a design constraint is important to consider, especially on mobile devices where the Internet connection is flaky and not near as fast as our home computers.
Remember we’re building websites for the World Wide Web: there are many places in the world with much slower connections than us.
How Does Web Page Speed Affect?
The major search engines measured how much web site slowdowns hurt their business metrics:
- Bing – A page that was 2 seconds slower resulted in a 4.3% drop in revenue/user.
- Google – A 400 millisecond delay caused a 0.59% drop in searches/user.
- Yahoo! – A 400 milliseconds slowdown resulted in a 5-9% drop in full-page traffic.
On the faster side, companies from a variety of vertical markets had praise for the benefits gained from improving performance:
- Shopzilla – Speeding up their site by 5 seconds increased the conversion rate 7-12%, doubled the number of sessions from search engine marketing, and cut the number of required servers in half.
- Mozilla – Shaving 2.2 seconds off their landing pages increased download conversions by 15.4%, which they estimate will result in 60 million more Firefox downloads per year.
- Netflix – Adopting gzip compression, resulted in a 13-25% speedup and cut their outbound network traffic by 50%.
How to Monitor
For Web
- https://www.webpagetest.org/
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- https://tools.pingdom.com/
For Mobile
- MobiTest / Web page test
- ADB ( Android debug bridge)
- Remote debugging for mobile safari
- Yslow
- SpriteMe
- Icy (iOS specific)
Impact on Mobile Users
Today, we use the mobile phone for navigation, communication, and entertainment. We even use it as an electronic valet. Although, we use mobile devices for hundreds of different tasks, it has a few limitations. Mobile devices have a limited screen size, so whatever you do, you have to build your application or website in a way that it fits into that limited space. Also, if your device is truly a portable device, you will be able to carry it around. As a result, mobile manufacturers have to compact everything into a smaller size.
Finally, when you develop mobile websites or applications, you have to consider the features that mobile users actually expect from their devices, which are as follows:
Battery
Better battery life (6.1 people out of 10 are satisfied by this) 72 percent of the people rate their phone as very good or excellent.
Speed
64 percent of mobile users expect pages or apps to load in less than 2 seconds.
Reasonable data usage
Users don’t want to exceed their datacap