From this principle, we can see that it is impossible for today’s generation to like a slow website. In fact, potential customers often form an opinion about an entire company based on its website and how fast it loads. To make matters worse, users remember online loading times as being, on average, 35% longer than they actually are.
This probably isn’t news to you. The internet is full of articles, checklists, and best practice guides, ever since Google announced that it would be considering speed as a relevant signal for its ranking algorithm almost a decade ago. However, when there’s a chance to make changes to your site, and it’s about improving aesthetics, adding new functionality, or adding new content, speed always gets put on the back burner.
What makes this issue even more problematic is that how a site works in development is often quite different from how users experience it. Custom or third-party content often doesn’t behave the same way in development as it does in production, test images are often already in the developer’s browser cache, and API calls that are executed locally are often so fast that the delay isn’t noticeable.
The hard truth is that users care more about speed than all the other beautiful elements you’ve created on your website. Your business will lose sales, spend more on paid media, spend more on internal process infrastructure due to poor performance. Ultimately, your returns will be significantly delayed.
In this article, we’ll use Google’s recent announcement about page experience to walk through core speed metrics, why you should keep track of them on a regular basis across all your homepages, and how a slow online experience could be costing your business a lot of money.
Performance metrics to keep under regular surveillance
What is website speed and how do you measure it? In simpler times, load time (i.e., the time it takes for a page to fully load all of its elements) was the mantra of developers. Web designers raced to streamline internal processes and squeeze every last bit of capacity out of their servers. It was a sexy metric, simple to understand, and simple to measure.
The problem is that humans and machines do not perceive time in the same way.
Time is relative, or as Albert Einstein put it: “When you are in pleasant company an hour seems like a second. When you are sitting on a hot coal a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” In other words, time flies when you’re having a fun experience, but it drags while you wait between loading screens. Page Load Time considers how long it takes to load, not how long it loads.
As with all things internet, Google is setting the tone and standards when it comes to performance and experience. During the announcement of its latest Lighthouse overhaul, Google revealed new performance metrics and weight distribution.
Example table with information about V6 and V5 metrics and phases and importance
Some are best friends, but there are a few new additions. Before analyzing each individual metric, notice the weighting change. Google is now prioritizing frictionless navigation by increasing the combined weight of middle and main segment navigation. This change will have a significant impact on page rankings and could prove to be a milestone for online performance.
Additionally, Google has promoted three key metrics and will include them as signals for the code number of philippines anticipated version of the Search Rank Algorithm to be rolled out soon. These are called Core Web Vitals and include Largest Content Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It’s an effort to increase web developers’ awareness of core user experience needs like loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of page content.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
According to Google, LCP measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the main content of the page has loaded. In practice, in order to approximate when the main content is visible to users, it measures when the largest content element in the viewport is rendered on the screen. It is a metric for the perception of speed. Even if some elements are still loading once a significant portion is loaded, users consider the page to be ready to interact with.
According to Google, FID measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users have when they first try to interact with a page. In simple terms, think of it as a first impressions metric. While it’s part of Core Web Vitals, you won’t find this metric in the table above because it’s actually a combination of two separate metrics, one measuring the impression of load speed (First Contentful Paint) and one measuring the interactivity of sites (Time to Interactivity).
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
Marks the moment when the first text or image is displayed on the screen. FCP measures how long it takes the browser to render the first DOM (Document Object Model, or DOM) content after a user navigates to your page. Images, non-white canvas elements, and SVGs on your page are considered DOM content; anything inside an iframe is not included.
Time To Interactive (TTI)
Measures the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive. Measuring TTI is important because some sites optimize for content visibility over interactivity. This can create a frustrating user experience; the site appears to be ready, but when the user tries to interact with it, nothing happens.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Measures visual stability and the amount of unexpected layout shifting of the visible content of the page. This is because nowadays, the volume of dynamically loaded content is so great that changes can trigger unexpected behaviors in DOM elements that can confuse the user and ruin their experience. Think of all those annoying buttons that tend to change places every time you try to press them.
Speed index
Measures how quickly a page's content is visibly filled in. Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page loading.
Total Blocking Time (TBT)
Sum of all periods between FCP and Time to Interact when the task duration exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds. TBT measures the total amount of time a page is blocked from responding to user input, such as mouse clicks, screen taps, or keyboard presses.
Table Artificial Intelligence
Why is performance draining your resources?
Now that we’ve covered the key performance metrics Google uses, let’s talk business. But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. Yes, content is still king. Google claims to prioritize useful information over experience. “While all components of page experience provide the best information overall, even some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t negate having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for search visibility,” according to its latest announcement.
But as most e-commerce, online business managers and executives know, SEO is only one part of the equation. Stressed by fierce competition and slim margins, they know that scale matters and a single misstep can put them out of business.
Here are four negative impacts on your business caused by a tracking website or page performance:
First, your paid media strategy will cost more.
Slow landing pages have lower quality scores. And quality scores will determine when and if your ad appears to potential customers and its cost. The lower the performance, the higher the cost you pay and the less airtime your ad will be given. Higher quality scores allow you to bid lower for higher positions, reducing your cost per click (CPC).
Second, your organic search strategy is penalized.
Slow pages have higher bounce rates. To search engine algorithms, this is a sign of low-value content. Since search engines want to serve the most relevant content for any given query, your page will be penalized and shown to fewer potential customers. All of your team’s efforts to optimize SEO will instantly go down the drain.
To make matters worse, search engine crawlers only spend a limited amount of time on each website. In the event that your entire site takes a long time to respond, the bot will only index a limited number of pages.
Third, your customers will buy less
It's frustrating and painful to watch the lengths many businesses go to to get potential customers to click on their website only to see them bounce because they're not willing to wait for a page to load.
In our experience, a 7-second reduction in a metric like speed index reduced the financial customer bounce rate by about 18%. This highlights how 1 second could make all the difference in the world between a successful transaction and a very poor interaction.
Fourth, your investment in new tools will backfire
Analytics tools, automation platforms, and dynamic content providers rely on additional JS code that will execute during page load. On an already slow page, this will only exacerbate the problem. Instead of helping your site provide a better customer experience, these tools will end up doing the exact opposite.
Fifth, you will end up spending more on infrastructure.
To better understand the impacts of speed on your infrastructure, let's compare two pages with very different metrics.