Skip to content
Work with us
Work with us

The importance of website performance

In short, slow running websites result in higher bounce rates (users leaving the site quickly,) fewer return visits, unhappy users and thus, lost revenue and potentially a damaged reputation.

This is quite a bold and slightly daunting statement to open with, so let’s analyse this a little further. Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet) visiting your website each month there is one very important thing to bear in mind… Today people are consuming the web less and less with fast fibre optic broadband services, but more with mobile devices over slow wireless and 3G connections, however we still expect the same first rate, fast, experience. We have all been there, waiting for a page to load whether it is on a mobile device or not. It’s always frustrating as you’re usually in a hurry wanting train times, directions, or other important information that you really need, instantly! Very rarely do we visit a webpage and not want to get some information back.

So what’s making my website slow?

Well now, that is an open ended question to which there are many factors to take in to account, sadly, not all of which can be covered here. The simple fact is 80% – 90% of poor performance happens with the ‘front end’, but here are some of the main contributing factors to consider when looking at performance:

Back end

  • Server infrastructure
  • Database
  • Back end coding

Front end

  • Secure Socket Layer  (Most pages load slower under SSL)
  • Front end coding
  • External resources (images, style sheets, scripts)

It is important to understand the lifecycle of a web page. Every time you load a web page, or ‘make a request’, the following happens:

  1. The browser looks up the internet (IP) address associated with that domain
  2. Your request is transferred to that address so you arrive at the web server
  3. The web server receives your request and ‘delivers’ the content to the browser
  4. The browser interprets the content which has been delivered, using it’s own in-built interpreter or ‘rendering engine’.

Each request is costly, and each additional item that needs to be loaded only adds to this. If your pages require lots of JavaScript libraries this can easily double, or even quadruple, the time you page takes to load.

A look at the ‘scripts’

By scripts, we are referring to JavaScript, a technology used to make things ‘whizzy’ and interactive on your webpage’s. When the browser encounters a