Why should you care about website performance?

Posted By  MH - Studio Manager15/08/19

“No matter what, faster is better and less is more.”

Think with Google

Bounce Rate

You need to reach your users. You can’t sell to, influence, or learn from users that leave your site before the page loads, and if that’s longer than a user is willing to wait then you’re in for a bad time. The research team at Google observed that 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load [1].

Considering that the average time to fully load a mobile landing page in 2018 was fifteen seconds [2], the web has still got a way to go. These pages generally struggle due to bloated scripts and images. There’s some easy targets for optimisation, see web.dev to test your site (or ours, we’re not shy), but we can always help with the tough stuff. Get in touch!

Mobile First

Mobile devices (including both smartphones and tablets) were said to account for 73% of users time using the internet globally in 2018 [3]. In fact, web browsing was rated as the most important activity that people used their phone for, followed by voice calls [4].

We’re starting to catch up with 5G, but mobile devices generally have slower connections than those visiting via desktop. Slower means longer waits for pages to load, and we know what that means. Insist on mobile-first development to target your users appropriately, build performant and responsive websites.

Go Green

The Internet’s data centers alone may already have the same CO2 footprint as global air travel [5]. We all do our best to make our homes energy efficient to save money, so why do companies have their websites packed full of expensive resources? They take time to download and increase the server usage during processing, which translates straight to more electricity from both user and website. We’re talking about all those scripts, images, and videos.

Is that JavaScript library conceptualised in 2006 really the best fit for your website? Can modern tooling strip away unused parts of that styling framework you’re using? Talk to us about static site generation and let’s get that old wordpress blog flying.

References

[1] Google Data, Global, n=3,700 aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, March 2016.

[2] Google Research, Webpagetest.org, sampled 11M global mWeb domains loaded using a globally representative 4G connection, January 2018.

[3] https://www.zenithmedia.co.uk/uk-lags-behind-global-average-mobile-internet-usage/

[4] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/telecoms-research/mobile-smartphones/consumer-mobile-experience

[5] https://internethealthreport.org/2018/the-internet-uses-more-electricity-than/