The Golden Age of Web Performance by Josh Fraser

We live in a world where millions of websites that you enjoy and find relevant vie for your attention every day. And although the web keeps expanding, everyone is busy and there are only so many hours in the day. We’ve entered the Golden Age of Web Performance.

In the early days of the web, your average visitor was thrilled that you simply had a website, as businesses and individuals carved out a piece of the web for themselves. But now we have so many options to get the same information, similar products, similar opinions. If your website is slow, your visitors are going to go somewhere else.

Let’s say you have one visitor who landed on your eCommerce website because they’re looking for a new beach blanket for the summer. She wants one that’s yellow or blue and made of organic materials. Searching around on blogs or on Pinterest, she comes across a blanket that you sell. She clicks the links.

And she sits.

And sits.

And sits.

All this while the page loads and she doesn’t get any closer to buying that blanket from you. Every second that she’s waiting to buy that beach blanket, is money that’s slipping away from you and that sale. So instead, she closes your the tab in her browser with your site and opens up Amazon. She searches and finds a blue beach blanket made from organic materials. And then she buys it. Amazon loaded more quickly. They got the sale.

Over 80% of web performance is based on front-end assets — HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images. In this Golden Age of Web Performance, we need to focus on and optimize those in order to make more sales, retain more eyeballs and earn more profit. And as mobile device use skyrockets and people use their smaller screens to do more, getting your page in front of them is more important than ever.

The first step to keeping those visitors — those prospective customers — is understanding and measuring your speed. It’s seeing what each and every user is experiencing, not just a sample of them that gives you the most optimistic picture.

We built Torbit Insight because we want to help you see and understand your users’ load times, to understand their impatience and their pain. You may never get that visitor back if you’re not measuring the front end and how every single user is experiencing their individual load time. Because once you measure, you can optimize, graduate into the ranks of the leaders in the Golden Age of Web Performance and win.

Josh Fraser is the co-founder and CEO of Torbit. Torbit makes websites faster by automating front-end optimizations that are proven to increase the speed of your website. Try Torbit Insight today and understand how page speed is affecting your conversion rate, bounce rate and revenue.

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