Speed Matters — How Site Performance Shapes Your Website’s Effectiveness

Imagine opening night of the big musical. The actors are in position, the orchestra is poised, the crowd is hushed with anticipation. 

But then…the curtain doesn’t work. It’s stuck. Then slowly, slowly, it begins creeping up. The crowd, once eager, is now impatient. The actors, once ready, are now anxious. And the orchestra doesn’t quite know their cue.

This is what it’s like when a website fails to load — or loads slowly. All the strategy, design, and technical prowess that came together to create an exceptional digital experience is compromised because site performance was not giving similar top billing. 

Your website performance has a direct connection to its effectiveness as a conversion tool. If you’re not thinking about performance, your conversion rate will suffer. 

What is Site Performance?

The ability of your website to deliver and present information effectively is generally referred to as its performance. And poor website performance has wide-ranging impact on your digital strategy, as your carefully crafted branding may not reach its target audience, or a poor site experience could degrade their overall brand impression. Related considerations:

• A slow or choppy site experience may prompt once-motivated users to bounce — according to Google, as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%. 
• Search engines may not prioritize your content in the rankings, since page speed is a key factor contributing to Google’s ranking algorithm. 
• Users accessing your site on a mobile device — which could be up to half of them — may encounter significant difficulty.

The good news is, there are very clear steps you can take to improve your site performance and mitigate these concerns.

One note — there are many tools that can help you gauge your site performance and load speed, and one commonly cited tool is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. However, take those results with a grain of salt — they can use slow mobile emulations that may not be representative of the performance your actual audience experiences.

The Causes of Poor Site Performance

Poorly Structured Webpages

The more code and content that is stuffed onto a page — images, graphics, tracking codes, various widgets and scripts — the longer it will take to load. Google research indicates that as the number of elements (e.g. text, titles, images) on a page balloons from 400 to 6,000, the likelihood of conversion drops by 95%. And the way those elements are organized, structured, and prioritized can also impact the load. 

This makes it particularly prudent to take a lean approach to both coding and content. Some approaches include:

For images:

• Generating derivative images from an original upload, enabling the site to serve the minimum size images needed on each page. 
• Only allowing images to load that are appropriate for the browser size 
• Lazy loading images below the fold
• Avoid uploading excessively large or uncompressed images that can take a long time to load

For code:

• Using lightweight coding practices, such as aggregating and minimizing CSS and Javascript files to reduce the number of requests per page load
• Loading JavaScript in the footer to eliminate render blocking
• Using caching modules and practices appropriate to the CMS or hosting provider

We also recommend including site performance in your quality assurance testing phase — tools such as Lighthouse and Blazemeter can assess site performance, optimization, and load. 

Lastly, as we ensure that our website experiences work across all desktop and mobile devices, this also has an impact on site performance. Keep in mind, mobile users may not always be on wifi — they may be using their data plan, and signal strengths may vary. The more lightweight your approach to coding and adding media to your site, the better experience you will be creating for all users, but particularly those on mobile devices.

Hosting

Selecting a website host is a critical decision. It’s like deciding on a mode of transportation to get somewhere on time — reliability, affordability, and sustainability are all factors to consider. Does it work? Can you pay for it? And you support this approach for the long-term?

Reliability is the most relevant factor to site performance. Can your chosen hosting solution load and deliver content effectively and consistently?

We find that generally organizations are split in whether they choose to self-host, use a cloud hosting service like Amazon Web Services, or contract with a managed host like Pantheon or Acquia. We’ve worked in all of these scenarios, and there’s no one right answer — the best choice for your organization is the one that hits your requirements for reliability, affordability, and sustainability.

Strong Site Performance — Insurance for Your User Experience

Site performance is the "last mile" of your digital strategy — can your website effectively convey its information to your users? Can it retain users long enough for them to engage and convert? Can it strengthen your brand impression, not work against it? 

Prioritizing site performance as a part of any website effort will elevate your overall success by ensuring your strategy works as intended.