Our performance culture

As a motorcycle rider since I was 11, I've always wanted the fastest bike, with ALL the performance parts.

For me the faster I could go, the better.

For digital services we also want the fastest and now have fast 5G networks, superfast broadband, cheaper fibre connections, government fibre schemes and faster, more capable mobile devices.

All great ways of getting people using the web and consuming content at faster rates than ever before.

Websites have also evolved to take advantage of users being on faster desktop and mobile connections with the inclusion of more video content, content sliders, tab menus, accordion menus, single page websites, heavy use of Javascript and CSS libraries, the list goes on.

Between 2017 and 2021 the average website page size increased by 55% (according to The HTTP Archive).

While most modern connections can cope with this, from Google's point of view this is detrimental to the user and through their Page Speed Insights reflects badly.

We're not always talking about elements taking several seconds to load. Most of this stuff is measured in milliseconds so during optimisation processes every small gain has a positive effect.
In fact Amazon found that when they improved their page speed by just 100ms it saw a 1% increase in revenue.
A recent survey has shown that 55% of users will abandon a site after waiting for more than 3 seconds for the page to load.

With this in mind Google have developed their Core Web Vitals to highlight key performance points to focus developers on which elements to fine tune when designing, developing and hosting their sites.
Therefore it's not just a development problem. To make sites more performant we now have to consider this at an early stage before any code is written.

Returning to my motorcycling reference, I quickly found out that It's not always about having a bike with the most power, it also needs to look good and handle well AND stop well and if that means I buy something that's not necessarily the fastest but a more balanced bike that's always what I'd go for.

As with everything, it's about achieving a balance.

Sure, we can design a site that will hit a high 90's score for desktop and mobile, but at what cost?
If we strip out too much video, imagery, etc there's a danger that the user will not be as engaged with the content and the time they spend on the site suffers as a result.
Creating engaging content for the user, that enhances your brand, informs the user and educates, often involves elements like video, high quality images, etc.
So it's about presenting these in the most performant way, and not necessarily omit them altogether.

In the past a company would design their site with little consideration for performance. Even as it was being developed there was more attention on following designs and the thought of optimising for performance was 'something we'd add later'.
Obviously 'later' often never comes and even if it does, this is usually too late with limited work that can be done to patch it up.

Nzime's approach to this has changed over the years and as we found ourselves adopting new design fashions, new development techniques, new formats, new frameworks, new libraries to use, we often took a step back to look at how this affects the site performance and adjusted our approach accordingly.
There is always work to do on this, but our culture around performance and how this fits with our clients branding, design systems, user experience and website structure is now a more important consideration than ever.

So make sure you bake in performance right from the design stage, achieve a good balanced approach from the get-go and you'll find it easier to keep your site performing at a high level throughout it's life-cycle.

It's great to have all the latest parts bolted on to your website to take advantage of the high performance networks we use nowadays, but think about what your customer actually wants from your site and if the performance penalty you're incurring is really worth it.

Bike Photo by Steve Sewell on Unsplash
Loading Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash