So You Want To Make Your Website Faster?
The speed at which websites load has always been a core focus of online businesses. This only grows more and more true over time as the number of competitors increases, search engines have been penalizing slow sites, and more and more actual “User Experience” research shows how badly a slow site can hobble sales.
Many reports and articles out there show alarming statistics:
Such as a quarter of all visitors giving up on pages that take over four seconds to load. How roughly two-thirds of visitors will use speed as a reason to not re-visit your site if they can buy products elsewhere.
There are a multitude of factors to take into account, and endless metrics now available through tools built into modern browsers such as Google Lighthouse, and the performance waterfalls built into browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Some of the big ones being:
- First Content Paint (FCP) — typically occurs once there is sufficient content for the browser to start rendering the text or images.
- First Meaningful Paint (FMP) — when…
