Performance Matters: Optimizing Page Load

1.2 What Is Website Performance?

So what does website performance mean exactly? Well, it refers to how fast a website loads and how soon it is usable by the visitors. So for example, if a website takes ten seconds to load then there is something wrong with it. Either your connection is super slow, or there's something wrong with the website, but more than often there's a problem on the website itself. So, ten seconds is, of course, an exaggerated example, but you get the idea. The more you have to wait, the bigger the chances are you are just gonna give up, and don't come back next time, especially if you are in a hurry. Now this hurts you, the consumer, or the customer, and also the website you're trying to visit, and in fact there is solid data that shows a direct connection between the load time and the conversion rate. According to a report by Web Performance Today, for every second of improvement, Walmart had a 2% conversion increase. Also by reducing the page load time by about two seconds, Firefox increased the downloads by about 15%, that's about ten million additional downloads a year. And these are just two examples but consider a website like Amazon.com, considering the amount of sales they have a 1% or even a 2% increase in sales can equal to hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more. So as you can see website performance is a big deal especially today in our times and I say that because you might be thinking, oh well it doesn't really matter because we all have very fast Internet connections. Not exactly true. Sure, there are countries that have very fast Internet connections, but that's not the case everywhere in the world. And think about this, a lot of traffic to websites now a days comes from mobile device, and as I said in the beginning, mobile devices use either slow Wi-Fi connections or 3G, 4G. The point is, they use these data plans, and that means you pay for the traffic. Here's an interesting website called whatdoesmysitecost.com. In this example, you get the results for Amazon.com, and you can basically see how much of the visits to Amazon.com costs in different countries. And these are best-case scenarios because these numbers are based on the least expensive data plan. And even so, we're paying close to a dollar in some countries, which is insane. So website performance is critical. And as a web developer, you need to know how to reduce the page load time and create a really good user experience. This will help you, and especially this will help your clients. So before we move on to the tools you can use to measure performance, and also the optimization techniques, there are two concepts you need to learn, overall performance and perceived performance. That's coming up next.