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A Quick Guide: How To Measure Your Site Performance
This is a quick guide on how to measure the your site performance.
I will show you how to do this with a couple of tools, I will link other tools and resources at the bottom of this post.
The topic of performance is one I have been invested in throughout my career. I was first inspired by the topic of performance as a junior developer working on systems with high traffic. I remember using older tools like JMeter and YSlow which was the first taste into performance testing and measuring.
Since then the landscape has changed and there have been advancements made in technology and tooling for performance. This is a broad topic, so expect more posts :)
Why Performance Matters
The performance of your site plays a role on your brand and engagement from users.
If your site is slow, people may not have the patience to wait for your page to load. They may not even return.
One example, Pinterest improved their site performance after running an experiment that saw:
- Mobile homepage landing page improvement of 60%
- Mobile sign up conversion rate by 40%
After the experiment, the Pinterest team implemented long term strategies to improve performance, observing
- 40% improvement in perceived wait times
- 15% increase in search engine traffic
- 15% increased in sign-ups
See the below table for the user perception of performance delays
Take that in. After 1 second, users lose interest.
After 10 seconds, users leave and may not return (ever).
Let’s see this in action.
First Step Let’s Start Measuring
The first step we want to do is start measuring.
I’m going to use a well known website as a test to demonstrate how you would measure site performance (this is purely for demonstration purposes).
I’m going to use WebPageTest, however you can also do this with other tools such as Lighthouse (Chrome extension and library)…
