Page speed, page speed, page speed…
It’s all people seem to talk about. How important is page speed improvement? I can respond to this question, with a question: are we trying to be excellent, or average?
We can point to simple measures that improve over time with better page speed, like:
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Higher customer engagement
- Lower visitor bounce rate
- Higher conversion
- Lower ad costs due to higher page quality ranking
- SEO ranking improvements
These are important improvements associated with faster page speed, but they are sometimes hard to measure while elements on our pages are constantly changing (products, designs, campaigns, offers, discounts, market conditions, seasonal trends, and so on).
Page speed improvement can sometimes be better understood as an essential part of our commitment to excellence.
A Daily Commitment To Excellence
When we visit the worlds finest sushi restaurant, nothing is out of place, no individual serving is out of time; it’s all just as perfect as it can be. Our experience is as perfect as it can be to support our effort to eat small bites of masterfully crafted fish on rice. Our minds are free to focus on each bite; nothing interrupts or impedes our experience. Not everything around us helps our experience, but nothing hurts or impedes our path to the next mind-blowing bite. This commitment to excellence starts at the top of the organization, and trickles down to each victorious bite.
Details, order, and experience matter. If we neglect or overlook the first small detail, then the rest of our operation will show that.
When we make our bed every morning, we are ordering our environment for our daily experience. When we enter our bedroom with our bed already made, our thoughts are clear — our mind does not stop for even a millisecond because there is nothing to notice. When we wash our dishes after we eat, we are ordering our environment for our daily experience. When we enter our kitchen with our clean sink, our thoughts are clear — our mind does not stop for even a millisecond because there is no imperfection to notice. We are not interrupted.
Making our bed or washing our dishes on time—just two small things— have trickle down effects, arguably every moment, in our daily lives.
No one saw us make our bed, or wash our dishes, but our daily operation has become more orderly and efficient. Our minds are more clear and orderly.
A daily commitment to excellence starts at the top, with small things.
Page Speed Defines Our Experience
Our path to the most rewarding bite of food in the world’s finest sushi restaurant is a conversion. We started somewhere, and we ended with great success—because the path, process and environment all encouraged our conversion; there was no disruption.
So too with fast web pages—the visitor’s mind is not interrupted on the path to conversion. Conversion is not always a purchase, it can be subscribing an email address, scrolling through a lookbook, seeing product star ratings appear on a page, finding and reading product details or specifications, viewing photos in a product thumbnail gallery, and so on.
With every single action we take on a web page, the faster the page loads or responds to our inputs, our experience will be better and more satisfying. Just like the sushi restaurant, it’s hard to explain how or why everything is just better—but if we think about it further, the lack of impediments to conversion for a task can dramatically improve our holistic experience.
If our page is as fast as possible, our visitor experience is as good as it can be. If our page speed is slowed down by third-party apps, blocking script tags, images that are not lazy loaded, page javascript errors, and font libraries, every single millisecond of our visitor experience is not optimal.
Does a slower page mean we will go out of business? No, but page speed matters in a way as to almost be spiritual in nature. The essence of our visitor experience will suffer from the first millisecond, to the last.
Why is the reservation list at the world’s finest sushi restaurant booked out 9 months in advance? What separates that restaurant from the best sushi restaurant in Las Vegas that has a table available this Tuesday at 8pm? Is it the fish? The world’s finest fish can be delivered by plane same-day. Is it the chef? There are many great chefs the world over.
The difference is the accumulation of a commitment to excellence and consideration of all the fine details along the path to a successful conversion.
Page Speed Improvement Requires Commitment To Each Of The Small Details
Every small decision we make on our web pages can affect our page speed—either positively or negatively. We often use third-party plugins or applications that save us time. Usually we select the plugins that save us the most time personally, not necessarily the ones that benefit our page speed and our customer experience the most. We are selfish and overwhelmed in addressing our daily duties at work. We often care more about our own experience to add +1 feature to our site, than the start-to-finish experience of our visitor.
Every single line of code we add to our pages has the potential impede our visitor experience. For example, I want to add an image below the fold to a blog article. I add the image like this:
<img src="/foo/wow.jpg" alt="So wow omg">
Great. Finished. I didn’t even need to think about that code, it just flowed out of my fingers. But it’s not the best, is it? It should have been:
<img src="/foo/wow.jpg" alt="So wow omg" loading="lazy">
My first image was not lazy loaded, which means that it will use high-priority browser resources and slow down initial page rendering. This is just a small detail, but it matters if we want to build the best experience for our visitor. There are 100 of these small decisions made on every page.
How Do We Commit To Page Speed?
So we want to commit ourselves to excellence, but how?
- Set aside more time and resources for page speed improvement—it takes work! Excellence is not achievable with 1-click, or with a fix-it-for-free app.
- Build a relationship with a trusted and experienced developer
- Audit third-party apps and plugins that are already in use—when in doubt, rip it out
- Rewrite plugins or site features in raw javascript to be faster and lighter
- Use a tool like Page Doctor or Google PageSpeed Insights to audit your pages and discuss a plan for improvement with your trusted developer
- Use apps, themes, templates, or plugins that are explicitly focused on page speed and performance, like Rapid Reviews or Search X
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