User Experience
Some say that when users are waiting for a site to load there is no user experience.
I think it’s far more critical than that, it’s absolutely terrible user experience!
Think of the last time you waited ages for a site to load… If it was a rally long time, then you probably started to get frustrated.
Heres the thing: They are judging performance NOT against the competition, they are judging it against the services they use every day. FaceBook, Twitter, BBC news site. This makes web performance very important, and the bench mark and risen.
About Media Surgery: We are web designers - Aberdeen.
Loyalty
If you went to a supermarket and you waited a long time to get to the
checkout and then the station was taking 30 seconds to scan an item,
would you return, when the competition is just down the road?
Think of your website like that.
Slow sites are a horrible experience.
Flip
it and turn that experience into speedy and efficient and you will gain
customer loyalty. Use these moments of opportunity to your advantage.
Steve Jobs quote
“The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works ”
This is very applicable to web performance. I bet you Steve didn't like slow sites!
Stats
- Yelp reduced First Contentful Paint (75th percentile) by 45% and Yelp Page Complete (75th percentile) by 25% and saw a 15% improvement in their conversion rate.
- The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.
- Retailer Furniture Village audited their site speed and developed a plan to address the problems they found, leading to a 20% reduction in page load time and a 10% increase in conversion rate.
- Please see WPO Stats for more
Google and Search Rankings
Think of Google as a recommendation engine.
If Google started recommending slow websites what do you think would happen?
Googles own reputation would start to deteriorate and people would blame Google for recommending these slow sites.
This
is why Google has built in performance metrics to it’s algorithm, as
time goes on more emphasis has been put on performance in that
algorithm.
Brand and reputation
Do you want your or your client’s site to be known as the slow site?
Poor reputation? Off course you don't
If they have got a cheap and clunky website….
Are there other parts of their business that they fall short on?
Performance matters!
Over the next few months i will cover:
- Hosting
- Tools
- Images
- What FCP, FID, TTFB and CLS are and how to improve each of them
- Caching
- Quick wins
- Craft Plugins
- The biggest performance blunders
- Mindset going forward
- + much more
I hope you can follow along. The best way is on Twitter @mediasurgery