If you want users to be happy and percieve your brand in a positive light, it’s crucial that your website loads in a fast and efficient manner.
It is no secret that a great user experience translates into a higher conversion rate which in turn helps the bottom line of any business.
In this post, we will look at how the websites of the top five Canadian banks achieve that goal. The links used are the ones that show up first when searching for the particular bank on Google.
It’s worth mentioning that the average mobile user in Canada is on 3G network with an average download speed of 10300kb/s and a latency of 88ms. Although the tests are only performed on desktop, they can suggest what the user experience would be on mobile devices.
There are many metrics that can be used to measure the performance of a site. We’ve picked four that we think most impact the perception of the speed.
Since more and more users are on mobile devices today, we will measure the total data downloaded from each website on page load.
- Time it takes for content to be visible(speed index)
- Time until users can interact with the website (first interactive)
- The first point in time that something was displayed to the screen (first render)
- Time it takes for the server to respond (first byte)
- Total data downloaded
Finally, the tools used are a combination of Chrome DevTools and WebPageTest.
Let’s get started.
Speed Index
First Interactive
First Render
First Byte
Total Data Downloaded
Conclusion
From looking at the graphs, it’s clear that RBC has performed best across all categories with an average response time of 1.376s followed by CIBC with an average response time of 2.556s. CIBC has the lightest payload with a total of 10004kb on page load followed by RBC with 1357kb.
