Should you care about your Site Performance?
What is Site Performance?
To compress it into a single line — It is about making your site fast.
Now if we zoom that sentence (not literally), there are several layers and complexities to unwrap, to achieve a fast site. But before diving into those layers, we should understand why we need a fast site.
Benefits of a Fast Site
User Experience (UX) / Customer Experience
Around 10 to 12 years ago, I remember it used to take 30 minutes to watch a 5-minute YouTube video. You open a video, you let it buffer for a few minutes while you do other chores, you come back to your system, watch the buffered few seconds or minutes, then it’ll buffer again, you go back to doing other tasks, you come back, watch some more of the buffered video, the process repeats until you complete that video. It felt normal then. It was a 360p video, 2G internet and an average i3 processor desktop.
If the same experience were to happen today, would we be able to accept it? I don't think so.
Over the last decade, the technology has seen a tremendous upgrade and the user’s patience has become hairline thin. Today we can stream high-quality FHD, QHD, UHD content without any lag, delay or buffering. We don't need a stationary desktop anymore, but a handheld mobile is enough to achieve several of the users' tasks.
The point is, the users have access to high-quality devices and super-fast internet. If you provide them with a slow web experience with your site, you risk losing them as customers. They do not possess the patience of a saint anymore. They have ultra-fast gadgets in the palm of their hands, and even with it, if you can’t provide a decent web page load speed, it's only a matter of time before your competitors will poach your customers away from you.
Assuming your website is secure and usable (these are topmost priority), if you can provide fast page loads, the user will be able to finish their journey and come back for more.
For example, on an e-commerce site, the user will be able to place an order fast and might be interested in some more shopping or with cross-sell up-sell recommendations. Whereas, if the site had a slow page load speed, the customer’s journey will be impacted. They may lose focus, or worse, lose interest in shopping on your site, or even worse, stop recommending or sharing your site and products with their friends and family.
The above example can be extended to any other domains too, like banking sites, educational sites, portfolio sites and others. Slow sites will negatively impact the user experience and the customer journey.
Business Impact
As discussed in the above example, a site with poor page load speed will impact the customer journey, which can in turn impact the business. If the customers lose their patience and stop their journey, or have very few transactions on the site, or share negative reviews with their social circle of how your site tested their patience, then more dent on your business.
If your competitors grab this opportunity and act the saviour by providing a fast site, don't be surprised if the customers jump ship. Of course, a customer switching brands will depend on several other factors as well, like range and variety of products, services, discounts, loyalty points, return or refund policy, customer care support and much more. Site Performance is also one of many important factors in keeping your customers with you.
Slow sites will surely impact your business, maybe not in the short term, but in the long term it will, unless you address the site performance problems at their budding stage. And watch out for your competitors. Track their site performance data, some data points are publicly available, thanks to Chrome UX Report (CrUX). Stay ahead of them to retain your customers.
Environmental Impact
We all know climate change and global warming are active life-threatening problems today. How can a fast site performance contribute positively to the environment? Actually, it can’t, at least not directly.
A fast-performing site certainly cannot negate or reverse the problems caused by industrial emissions. But, I’d like to invite you to explore the following possibilities.
Every site and every page that we load is transferred over the network through air medium and cables under the sea. All this needs infrastructure that consumes power. Additionally, your gadgets consume power.
A site with poor performance is caused due to several reasons; some of the common ones are, excessive styles, scripts, images, high-quality images on small viewports, unused styles and scripts, too many 3rd party assets, poor code or database executions on the server and much more…
Loading a poorly performing site will result in more power being consumed in transferring these additional payloads over the network, and more CPU resources and power are consumed on your gadgets in downloading, processing and executing these additional assets that is contributing to a slow and bad UX.
All this additional power consumed is still coming from our energy sources and power generators which are major contributors to global warming. We are moving to renewable energy sources, but as of today, we are still hugely dependent on coal and oil.
Imagine if that poor site was optimised into a fast site by removing all the excessive assets. Let’s assume we have saved 100KB of assets on your site (believe me, on huge problematic sites, we can save MBs worth of data by optimising for site performance.) Now, you cannot save the planet by saving 100KB of data over the network and on your device, right? But stay with me, it’s about to get magical!
This 100KB minimal number is only for a single page load. A user will eventually open multiple pages on your site, say 5 pages. So, we now save 5x 100KB of data. It’s not over yet.
Your site may have thousands and millions of users. Every single one of them will save 100KBs of data. So, instantly our data savings rise to ~100,000 users * ~5 pages * ~100KB. It’s still not over yet.
Imagine how many times per day, how many sessions the user will have on your site, with each session, the user opening at least 5 pages. And it is not just your site, the user will open many other sites as well. If all those sites were optimised imagine the amount of data savings. All this we are discussing for a single day. Imagine how much we could save every month, every year, considering the internet is a part of our daily life these days.
Approximately, number of days (yearly or monthly) * number of different sites visited * number of users or traffic per site * number of sessions on a site * number of pages per session * amount of savings per page worth of data and power consumption can be reduced if we optimise our sites for performance. I’m willing to bet this number is significantly higher than our initial 100KB.
This may still not be enough to save the planet or to negate the effects of our power emissions. However, it is still a considerable savings in power when compared to having a poorly performing site.
Web Performance Awareness
Optimising your site performance will help improve the customer UX and will have a positive impact on your business as well. You may not single-handedly be able to save the planet, but awareness among the tech community on the need for good site performance will eventually lead us to create a better web.
