A website performance audit is like a health check-up for your online presence. It helps identify areas that need improvement to make your website faster, more user-friendly, and better optimized for search engines.
A slow website can lead to a 7% decrease in conversions for every one-second delay. This is why regular performance audits are crucial to ensure your website is running smoothly.
To optimize your website's performance, start by identifying and fixing broken images, which can account for up to 50% of a website's total file size.
Why and What?
Before you start adding Progressive Web App features to your site, it's essential to get 'PWA-ready' first. This means having a solid foundation in place.
You can't fix problems like blocking JavaScript or bloated images with PWA magic alone. PWAs need a solid foundation.
Auditing your site is the first step to building a resilient, performant experience. This involves an objective review of what works well and where there could be improvement.
A site audit will help you identify quick wins that can be implemented with minimal sign-off. You'll also get metrics to prioritize effort and concrete evidence to brag about once you've made improvements.
Auditing your site or app gives you a baseline for data-driven development. This means you can measure the impact of changes and compare your site with competitors.
You'll get a clear picture of what's working and what's not, and you'll be able to identify areas for improvement.
Time-Sensitive Audits
Running a website performance audit doesn't have to be a daunting task. If you only have 5 minutes, you can run Lighthouse on your homepage and save the report data. This gives you a quantified baseline and a todo list for improvements to performance, accessibility, security, and SEO.
You'll get a clear understanding of your website's current state and know exactly what to focus on first. This rapid assessment can help you identify low-hanging fruit for quick wins and prioritize your efforts.
Understanding Your Site
To understand your site, you need to know your audience, stakeholders, and context. This will help you prioritize refactoring and focus on the most important aspects of your website.
Your audience is who visits your site, why they visit, and how they use it. For example, if you have a high bounce rate or low time-on-page, it may indicate that your site is not meeting their needs.
Stakeholders are those who have a vested interest in your site's performance, such as business owners or marketing teams. They may have different priorities, so it's essential to understand their needs and expectations.
To get started, try the requirements gathering exercises from our PWA training resources, which can help you understand your audience, content, and design for all users.
Here are some key metrics to focus on:
- Pages that are driving the most traffic
- Pages that have the highest bounce rates
- Pages that have the lowest time-on-page
These metrics can give you an idea of where to focus your efforts and improve your site's performance.
Audience, Stakeholders, Context
Understanding your audience is crucial in determining the priorities for refactoring your website. Your audience is the people who visit your site, and understanding their needs and behavior is essential in creating a website that meets their expectations.
Who are your stakeholders, and what are their priorities? This will affect the way you structure, present, and share your audit data. Stakeholders may include business owners, developers, and marketing teams, each with their own priorities and goals.
If you can't audit your whole site, check page analytics to get an idea of where to focus. High bounce rates, low time-on-page, and unexpected exit pages can be a good indicator of where to begin. For example, a study by Portent in 2019 reveals that website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time between seconds 0-5.
Business metrics such as hosting costs, ad clicks, and conversions can also provide valuable insights. Get an overview from stakeholders of what data matters to them. This will help you tailor your audit to their specific needs and priorities.
Here are some key questions to consider when understanding your audience, stakeholders, and context:
- Who visits your site?
- Why and how do they use it?
- What's your performance budget?
- Who are your stakeholders, and what are their priorities?
By answering these questions, you'll be able to create a website that meets the needs of your audience and stakeholders, and ultimately drives business success.
Define Site Periods
To define site periods, you need to choose when to audit your site. This can be done manually or set up for automatic checks.
You can start the audit process on your own schedule, or set it up to run automatically at regular intervals.
Manual audits give you control over when and how often you check your site, while automatic checks ensure consistent monitoring.
The Audit Process
The audit process is where the magic happens. It's where you get to uncover the hidden issues that are slowing down your website and find ways to improve its performance.
To start, you'll want to install our monitoring tag via Google Tag Manager, which requires minimal effort and no extensive access or significant involvement from your development team. This will allow you to collect performance data from various devices and networks, giving you a comprehensive understanding of your website's performance without ongoing manual intervention.
The goal is to record the state of your site before making any changes, to uncover problems and set a starting point for improvements or regressions. This will give you data to justify and reward development effort.
Here's what you should test:
- Multiple page types within your site, not just the home page.
- For single page apps, test different components, routes, and UX flows, and not just the first load experience.
By following these steps, you'll be able to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your website's performance.
Why Choose Our Service?
Our Web Performance Audit is designed to deliver critical insights into your website's performance, focusing on your most important pages (money pages).
For just €5,000, you'll get a thorough analysis that identifies and solves issues affecting your user experience and business outcomes.
An audit provides a comprehensive understanding of your website's current performance status, establishing a baseline for improvement and directing you towards addressing the most critical technical issues promptly.
Why Choose Us?
Our Web Performance Audit is a game-changer for businesses looking to boost their online presence. We help you identify performance issues that might be slowing down your website.
Our audit covers Core Web Vitals, which include detailed performance metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Input Delay (INP). This gives you a clear understanding of how your website performs.
We also provide competitor benchmarking, so you can see how your performance stacks up against top competitors. This helps you stay ahead of the curve and make data-driven decisions.
Our audit has a significant impact on business KPIs, such as conversion rates and customer satisfaction. By improving your website's performance, you can expect to see real results.
We provide actionable insights for your development team, making it easy to implement technical improvements. Our goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need to take your website to the next level.
Here's a breakdown of what our Web Performance Audit covers:
- Core Web Vitals: detailed performance metrics (LCP, CLS, and INP)
- Competitor benchmarking: your performance compared to top competitors
- Business KPIs: impact of performance on key business metrics
- Technical improvements: actionable insights for your development team
Key Benefits
Choosing our service can bring a wealth of benefits to your website's performance. An audit provides a comprehensive understanding of your website's current performance status.
By uncovering performance issues, you'll identify why your website may be slow and learn how to improve its speed and efficiency. Our audit covers Core Web Vitals, including LCP, CLS, and INP, to give you a detailed performance metrics.
Our performance audit establishes a baseline for improvement and directs you towards addressing the most critical technical issues promptly. This helps you make informed decisions about where to focus your development efforts.
You'll also get competitor benchmarking, which compares your performance to top competitors. This helps you understand how your website stacks up against the competition.
Here are some key benefits of our performance audit:
- Establishes a baseline for improvement
- Directs you towards addressing critical technical issues
- Provides competitor benchmarking
- Helps you make informed decisions about where to focus your development efforts
By choosing our service, you'll get actionable insights for your development team, including technical improvements. This will help your team make data-driven decisions to improve your website's performance.
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