Web performance - What is it and how to improve it?
Tags: webdev, seo, webperf
Published: 2021-03-05 10:34:16

This post was originaly posted in my [website](https://www.gscreations.io/blog/web-performance-what-is-it-and-how-to-improve-it).

Web performance is a keystone of any website. Your website might look amazing but if it doesn't have a good performance, does it show on google search results? Might be a challenge.

So what is web performance? Putting simply, Web performance is the measure of the page speed of your website. User doesn’t have much patience when going to a website, and if that website is slow you know what happens right? They seek another alternative. Of course that this is not linear but more and more everyday web performance is important.

Some statistic to back it up:

* If your e-commerce website is too slow, the basket abandonment can reach 75%
* 74% users leave the website on mobile if it doesn’t load after 5sec
* 44% of customers will tell their friends about a bad experience online
* Amazon realizes that “only” one second in their website could cost 1.6 billion in sales each year

Besides the load speed, all site performance is important to determine how your website stands among others.

If your website has a bad performance, no matter how good is your product, you have few chances to show up good in the search results of Google. Therefore, a website with good performance has much more chances to show up in many searches. Web performance in the most basic form, or put differently, a website with good performance is a website with minimal waiting time load. Even that your website is fast but on mobile is not responsive, your customer ends up going to a different website right? Thus responsive website, i.e. a website that is mobile friendly is a good check web performance checklist for any website.

Then what makes a website with good performance? Web performance focuses not only on speed but on many different topics. All those topics are possible to achieve on your website.


For now, I will just mention the 5 main topics about web performance that you should take into consideration, in my opinion,  on your website. Let’s go through them.

* __Mobile Friendly__ 📱

A responsive website has more chances to show on Google search results. When you have a website with a good user experience on mobile your customers are happier. Nowadays many websites are built with a mobile-first approach design

Statistics : 94% of People Judge Websites on Responsive Web Design

* __Accessibility__ 🦻🏻

Since a directive from 2016, all websites or apps of the public sector are demanded to meet technical accessibility standards. Most private companies are now also implementing the same standards to their websites. What does this mean? Accessibility is when a website or apps are designed that people with disabilities can use them. Can be color contrasts, images with no alternative text, no enough labels in the forms, etc. Main point: Your website has to be accessible.

Statistics : About 217 million people worldwide have moderate to severe vision impairment, which is expected to triple from 36 million to 115 million by 2050. In addition, 826 million people live with a near-vision impairment

* __Speed__ 🚄

Well, this is the first one that comes to everyone's mind right? Your website has to be fast. The load time. How fast? For mobile, your website should load in 1-2 seconds. It’s crazy but pages that take more than 3 seconds tend to be abandoned by the users ( around 53% of mobiles sites).

Statistics: 1 sec delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%

* __Images__ 🖼️

Everyone likes images on their websites. The bigger the better right? Well, when images are not optimized they take too much space, and by taking too much space what happens to your website? Yes, it goes slow, really slow.

On the other end if you shrink all images to the point that the products are not appealing, then sales can be affected again. It’s all about finding the sweet spot .

Statistics: 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load.

* __Deserve be mentioned__ 🍢

There are other topics you should ask/discuss when it comes to web performance:

* Not the best web hosting
* Delete plugins or ask if you need that plugin
* Remove not used CSS
* Minify files(js, CSS, HTML)

This was a small and fast introduction to web performance. What are for you, your main topics about web performance? I will go back to this subject focusing on each topic in the next posts. You can always follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mugas11) where I talk about web development and entrepreneurship among other subjects 😊.