A fast website is a desired goal of many professionals working with the internet and also of many consumers who want more and more agility to meet their needs.
Performance is a basic requirement in the development of a site, taking into consideration effective practices to optimize page loading time without losing visual experience is not a once in a lifetime job. It needs to be constant, and have constant analysis as a parameter, especially before and after significant changes.
In today's article, you will learn some important metrics to pay attention to when analyzing your site's performance and some tips on what to do if any of them are not satisfactory.
Page Size Metrics
Pages that are too big can detract from the experience of the user who wants to access information in a timely manner. With larger pages, your site will take longer to load information on the user's device, causing frustration, since people expect immediate answers to their needs, whether it's shopping, a blog post on a topic of interest, or a recipe video.
According to surveys, about 22% of respondents say they close the site when the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Still another 14% say they visit a competitor's site.
To avoid the risk of losing sales, we recommend maintaining an average page size of up to 3mb and working with gradual loading techniques to further improve the user experience.
Load Time Metrics
This is one of the most important performance metrics; it is possible to see the amount of time users need to access the complete content of your site. If this time is high, search results may decrease traffic to your site and the bounce rate may increase.
Furthermore, loading times that are too high can even impact your revenue; according to surveys, more than 70% of consumers admit that page speed influences their likelihood to buy.
If, when analyzing your site, your numbers are higher than 5 seconds, you need to do a more detailed study and trace the elements of your site that may be impacting your e-commerce performance.
Metrics relating to Requests
Requests are requests that the browser needs to make in order to access your site, such as a DNS record, for example. The more requests the browser needs to make on a site, the more time it will take to communicate with your site, resulting in a longer wait from the user.
If your site has more than 150 requests, it's time to analyze your site's active markup and JavaScript, and look at how many requests are used by third-party applications and whether your site actually needs them.
Metrics regarding Content size and requests by content
This metric will show you the size of the content available on your site and the percentage that each content type consumes of the total page load time.
Look at contents like the size in KB of the Scripts, the size that the images in your site are using, see if the Fonts used in your site can't be changed by native google fonts, code contents also need to be analyzed like CSS, HTML and even Redirects.
Now that you know the metrics to keep an eye on your site, it's easier to improve it. If you need help doing this analysis we recommend using tools like SpeedBy that will analyze your site and show you each of these metrics, plus valuable tips to improve your site's performance.
And if you want to dig deeper into the subject, we recommend reading our e-commerce performance guide.
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