Joydeep Dey

Why is Web Performance Important for Your Business? Successful websites need to be fast, scalable and secure. To build websites and applications which attract and retain users, you need to create a good user experience. Part of good user experience is ensuring that the web content is quick to load and responsive to user interaction. In fact, page load time is the first thing any user notices about your website. And it might be the last thing, if your website is too slow. But when exactly does a website feel slow? How can you speed up your website? In other words, how can you improve the performance of your website? And why is web performance important for your business? In order to answer these questions, let’s understand what web performance actually is and why it is so important. What is Web Performance? Web performance is the objective measurement and perceived user experience of a web site or application. It refers to the speed in which web pages are downloaded and displayed on the user's web browser. The topic of web performance is a vast one and includes major areas like reducing overall load time, making the site usable as soon as possible, smoothness and interactivity, perceived performance and performance measurements. Web performance also leads to less data travelling across the web, which in turn lowers a website's power consumption and environmental impact. How Do Users Perceive Performance? When is a website actually fast? Users typically perceive a website as rather slow or fast, depending on when the first relevant content is displayed. Another indicator is how long it takes until you can enter data, click on the navigation bar, or interact with the website in some other way. Performance is about user perception. How a user perceives your performance is as important, or perhaps more important, than any objective statistic; but it's subjective, and not as readily measurable. Perceived performance is user perspective, not a metric. How Can You Improve Performance of Your Website? How can you turn a slow website into a fast one? The longer it takes for a site to respond, the more users will abandon the site. Some aspects which can affect the speed of page load include browser/server cache, image optimization, and encryption (for example SSL), which can affect the time it takes for pages to render. This lag time can be decreased through awareness of typical browser behavior, as well as of how HTTP works. Website optimization or Web Performance Optimization (WPO) is the field of knowledge about increasing web performance. Web performance optimization improves user experience (UX) when visiting a website. The performance of the web page can be improved through techniques such as multi-layered cache, light weight design of presentation layer components and asynchronous communication with server side components. At least 80% of the time that it takes to download and view a website is controlled by the front-end structure. Web designers & developers employ several techniques that streamline web optimization tasks to decrease web page load times. This process is known as Front End Optimization (FEO) or content optimization. FEO concentrates on reducing file sizes and minimizing the number of requests needed for a given page to load. Why is Web Performance Important for Your Business? Various studies confirm that there is a connection between the speed of a website and its popularity among users. For instance, Amazon found that already 100 ms of additional page load time cause a revenue decline in the realm of single-digit percentages — at the size of Amazon, that’s upwards of US$1 billion per year. And also Google did their homework: if users have to wait only half a second longer for their search results, traffic drops by 20%. Let’s dive deep into more details here and discuss the most important business metrics that are influenced by web performance: • Traffic: The traffic of a website refers to the data flow produced by visitors. It thus loosely corresponds to the popularity of the website. There are different metrics to quantify traffic, e.g. the number of visitors or their time-on-site. As a basic rule, more traffic means more revenue for the website provider. • Unique Visitor: Unique visitors (UVs) are the individual people who visited the website during a given timeframe. Every single person can only contribute to the overall number by one in a given time window, no matter how often he or she visits the website. • Page Impression: In contrast, the number of page impressions (PIs) refers to the overall count of website visits. Here, it does not matter whether a single user visited a page twice or whether two users visited the same page once each: every click counts as a PI. Since advertisements are typically paid for by how often they were displayed, the numbers of PIs are often used for ad billing. • Conversion Rate: The conversion rate (CR) denotes the proportion of page visitors who switch from one status group to another; in e-commerce, for example, it often means the share of product page visitors who end up buying the product. Fast pages, in particular, facilitate high conversion rates, because user activity is not constantly interrupted by waiting times. • Bounce Rate: The bounce rate (BR) can be seen as a counterpart to the conversion rate. It denotes the share of visitors who drop out before interacting with the website. Long page load times are among the prime reasons why visitors lose interest and leave. If a website is particularly slow, potential customers might be gone, before they have even seen the website. Conclusion Web performance is all about making websites fast, including making slow processes seem fast. Faster website download speeds have been shown to increase visitor retention and loyalty and user satisfaction, especially for users with slow internet connections and those on mobile devices. The speed of your website is intuitively perceivable, objectively measurable, and critical for your business success. However, there are many pitfalls on the way to a fast website - and whoever stumbles, loses the users’ favor and thus hard cash. A fast website is not only “nice to have”; it is essential to create an enjoyable user experience.