Hi <<First Name>>,
Lots of great stuff in this month's edition:
- The fastest and slowest retail sites in the EU and UK
- Downtime versus slowtime: Which costs you more?
- Why is mobile performance still so bad?
- Case studies from T-Mobile and Preply
- Truth, lies and progress bars
- A wealth of page speed optimization tips and best practices
- Our latest performance hero: Sergey Chernyshev!
What's on your mind lately when it comes to performance and usability? Hit reply and let me know!
Until next month,
Tammy
b: @tammyeverts.com
m: @tammy
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Retail sites fail to deliver optimal LCP times to mobile
Apropos of Jeremy Keith's post about mobile (discussed further below), I was interested in seeing how leading retail sites in the EU and UK perform on mobile. I took a look at our EU/UK Retail Benchmark dashboard, which tracks the home pages of industry-leading retail sites, including ASOS, IKEA, Tesco, LEGO, Aldi, and more.
While none of the sites delivered Largest Contentful Paint times – on a 'slow' mobile connection – within Google's threshold of 2.5 seconds, one site, Edeka, did start to render within 2 seconds.
It was interesting to note that, for several of the sites, the LCP time was recorded when the largest visual element had not yet rendered. This highlights a known difficulty with tracking the LCP element in mobile browsers, and it's something you should be aware of and investigate before trusting your LCP numbers for mobile
In many cases, sites struggled with issues like:
- Slow backend times (sometimes as much as 10 seconds!)
- Slow blocking JavaScript and CSS
- Poorly performing custom fonts
- Excessive JS before the LCP element
Wondering how to improve LCP times for your pages? Here's everything you need to know to start measuring, debugging, and optimizing LCP.
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Downtime vs slowtime: Which costs more?
Major site outages grab headlines. But what if I told you that boring old page slowdowns may hurt your business more than outages in the long run? Among other things, this post includes a formula for estimating the cost of slowtime versus downtime for your site.
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The web on mobile?
Our devices are better than ever, so why does visiting websites on mobile feel even worse than ever? Jeremy Keith breaks it down:
"...the experience of using websites on a mobile device is awful. Never mind the terrible performance penalties incurred by unnecessary frameworks and libraries like React and its ilk, there’s the constant game of whack-a-mole with banners and overlays. What’s just about bearable in a large desktop viewport becomes intolerable on a small screen.
"This is not a technical problem. This doesn’t get solved by web standards. This is a cultural problem."
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Case study: T-Mobile
T-Mobile's data-driven approach to web performance led to a 20% reduction in user site issues and a 32% improvement in cart-to-order rate. This is an excellent case study that covers how the team:
- Used data to raise awareness of web performance
- Scaled performance improvements to maximize impact
- Focused on specific performance upgrades
- Cultivated a web performance culture by democratizing the data
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How to improve webpage speed: Tips and best practices
While this guide by Sjardo Janssen is aimed at HubSpot template developers, it's packed – and I do mean packed – with detailed tips that are broadly applicable.
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Guide to implementing speculation rules for more complex sites
The Speculation Rules API allows users to benefit from a performance boost by either prefetching or prerendering future page navigations to give quicker – or even instant – page navigations.
The API has been specifically designed with ease of implementation in mind, but there are some considerations that complex sites in particular need to consider before using it. Barry Pollard has created this guide to help you understand these considerations.
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Case study: Preply
Here's another great case study, this time by the team at Preply, shared by Stefano Magni:
"To improve our two most important pages from an SEO and SEM perspective, we started digging into how to improve their INP, a metric to assess web pages’ interaction speed. It was an R&D project driven by a clear goal baked by tons of data and assumptions."
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Performance Hero: Sergey Chernyshev!
Continuing our series of Performance Heroes, our latest hero is Sergey Chernyshev! Sergey is a well-known early champion of web performance and user experience. He's been a huge part of creating the friendly, inclusive culture we enjoy today. From starting the very first web performance meetup group in NYC to creating open-source tools, Sergey epitomizes everything we love about our community.
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Find me at WebExpo!
I'm so excited to be speaking at WebExpo in Prague on May 29th. Among other things, I'll be demonstrating how (and why) to gather real user data, know how fast YOU need to be, create a better user experience, and improve the business metrics that matter to you – from bounce rate to conversions. If you're planning to attend, let me know!
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