What's website performance?

When we refer to a website's performance, we mean the speed of display for a page. The more performant the website is, the best the user experience is.

In Qualitycs and other tools, the performance is measured on a scale of 100. 100 being the best possible. A score of 80 or above is considered a good website.

Why website performance is important?

Users want the best experience possible with your website. If they have to wait too much, it degrades the experience.

Also, experiments showed a huge conversion drop when a website is slow:

Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%.

How to measure website performance ?

Performance monitoring tools replicate what a user would do: open the page and wait for it to be ready. Well, Qualitycs does exactly that: It automates the process.

The page is loaded in a constrained environment (always the same). The load time is measured for each component and each resource of the page. The impact of each component is also measured.

The tool then try to understand what's slow, what's not performing well, what can be optimized, etc. When those issues are identified, a report is generated and tips are proposed.

Why is it important to check for performance issues regularly?

Nowadays, websites are like LEGO: you take bricks from many places and assemble them. This means that your website depends on other modules.

Those can change over time. Because they receive updates, because of bugs etc. It's thus important to check that everything is still performing well.

By running performance tests regularly, you can identify issues as soon as they happen and correct them fastly.

What can impact my website's performance ?

The big impacts on website performance are usually the static resources:

• Images not sized properly, not optimized
• Compression not configured correctly
• Cache issues or misconfigurations
• External Fonts or styles
• DNS issues
• External dependencies not loading correctly
• 3rd party scripts
• Bugs in your code
• …

It's impossible for developers to think about all those issues and optimize everything. That's why you need a performance monitoring tool such as Qualitycs. It'll pinpoint the low-hanging fruits that you can optimize. And will also guide you technically.

I can't optimize my website myself, who can help?

Qualitycs will give you technical tips to optimize the performance of your website. It'll guide you based on the technologies you use.

If you need help with the optimizations, we provide a consultancy service. An expert of our team can optimize your website with you.

What's the cost of performance optimization?

Optimizations take time. And you don't need to optimize everything at once. You'll need to spend time or hire developers to optimize your website. Yet, performance issues can cost a lot. It can impact your conversions, SEO score and your reputation.

Technically, it'll also consume more Bandwidth, CPU and RAM. The price you'll pay for your optimizations will be a lot less than the loss of not optimizing.

What's the impact of website performance on SEO?

Google and other search engines prefer a performant website. They run the same tools as Qualitycs to assess the speed of website they crawl.

A well performing website will be higher in search results than a poorly optimized one. Because most users now browse the web on mobile, it's also important to have a mobile friendly website.