Web Performance
Hi guys,
I'm currently researching the topic(thinking about developing a solution) and I would love to hear thoughts and experience from working on websites/applications.
- Do you consider application performance while building the website?
- Do you monitor your website's performance?
- Did you ever have clients/companies complaining about poor performance?
- Google rates websites mobile-first and performance has a great impact on your search result(Lighthouse, etc..), do you monitor this?
Thanks :)
We make our technology choices (tools, processes, languages etc) with performance in mind, both in terms of speed but also stability, documentation, community etc - I think everyone says/thinks that though. One example would be that we've opted for Ruby on Rails, even though plenty would steer away from it because it's not the new hot thing (stupidly).
We tend to not habitually carve out time to optimise performance each week or month, it's only when we really start to notice things ourselves or a customer asks (this is very rare, so arguably we're doing alright). Like last week we decided our analytics views were getting a little slow, so we rewrote a bunch of the queries, added better caching, and now they're way faster.
We use lighthouse each time there's a major update to our website, though I guess we should use that sort of tool more often!
What do you think about a tool that you could integrate into your development process for performance?
Bundle size, lighthouse, thresholding, monitoring, and more as part of your development process?
Did you ever try to search for a similar tool or do you think it's not that necessary?
It's not something we need urgently, but funnily enough we have discussed your sort of idea before i.e. why couldn't the sort of things that lighthouse rates negatively be more easily highlighted earlier in the process etc
I don't really focus on speed within my app, but of course, I try to make it as fast as possible.
But for the landing page, I monitor everything. Unlike our app, I need the landing page to rank higher on Google.
Although if your app is open to the public(example: marketplace), then yes, you should monitor and optimize everything related to speed, responsiveness etc..
What do you use for monitoring?
Yes, yes, no, yes.
There has been many different takes on this, but users will abandon a website if it takes too long to load. The website will be your customers first glance at your company, you do not want to make a bad first impression.
You mentioned Lighthouse, which I enjoy using, I'd also like to toss https://gtmetrix.com/ into the conversation as it allows you to benchmark your website from various different countries.
Thanks for replying!
You are completely right, the significance of website performance is crazy in terms of how it affects your customers and your revenue, from a quick google search you can find tons of articles about how companies improved performance and increased their revenue.
But for some reason, I think performance is still overlooked by a lot of websites/developers these days.
I've worked in a lot of startups and usually, they didn't bother with performance until it actually hurt the customers or the company.
Gtmetrix feels like an old solution with not too much-added value, don't you think?
In my opinion, it's a case of developers leaving performance gains on the table by using inefficient tools like React/Vue/Javascript-in-general when the websites do not really require it.
Startups typically don't have the time and/or resources to focus heavily on performance as it can be seen as a sideways movement when the goal is adding features. It's understandable but, like you, it's not something I agree with.
As for GTmetrix, I'd disagree. If you want a high level view of things that you could improve upon, there aren't too many I'd recommend above it. Especially as it is powered by Lighthouse. It shouldn't be the only tool you use, but it should be a part of your toolbelt.
I think we share relatively the same opinion.
About GTmetrix I think that as you said, it can be a part of my tool but not all...
In my opinion there should be 1 stop shop tool for all web performance-related stuff like bundle size, monitoring, location tests and more
Optimize to the best of your ability. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev/, https://gtmetrix.com/ and https://www.webpagetest.org/ to drill down on improvements. Image optimization is a super easy fix using TinyPNG, WEBP, etc.
Beyond that, a great hosting environment can make the biggest difference.
Ultimately though, unless you're an e-commerce site tracking microseconds on user interactions, just follow best practices.
Yes, Yes, Yes (when built by their team or 3rd party), Yes
I did have to explain some of the performance.
I think it is imperative to think about performance while you are architecting, designing, coding... because, few weeks down the line, you'd forgot some of the design decisions and/or have higher priorities to do another feature or bug fixes that you'll never get back to figure out that performance issue you wrote a // will come back to fix this
Yes (probably too much haha).
Not really. If it's fast today it will be fast tomorrow. I check it when I deploy.
Never.
Not really monitor it. I check it when I deploy.