“Performance” is a vague term that may refer to any number of characteristics depending upon the context in which it is used. When used in the context of ecommerce, the “performance” of a store might be defined by the revenue generated over a given time period. Alternatively, “performance” may instead refer to conversion rate, average order value, or customer life time value. In many ways, “performance” is determined by the metrics which are used to measure it.
Performance is also relative. Even in the a specific context (e.g revenue)—what comprises “good” or “bad” performance? In the case of revenue, it is usually agreed that “good” performance requires an increase in revenue. However, a 1% increase in revenue over a year may not be good if the goal was to achieve a 10% increase. To assess performance, one must not only define common methods with which to measure performance, but also the goals by which to measure performance against.
When referring to the web at large, “performance” is often synonymous with site speed.
Metrics
What are some metrics that may be used to measure performance?
- Page weight
- Time to first byte
- Time to interactive
- Time to first paint
- Number of resources loaded (by category or type)
Measuring the wrong thing leads to solving the wrong problem.
Google’s Test My Site app, released in June 2016, is designed to provide less-technical, business-minded professionals an easy way to measure their web performance. It uses three metrics:
- Mobile-friendliness: This is the quality of the experience customers have when they’re browsing your site on their phones. To be mobile-friendly, your site should have tappable buttons, be easy to navigate from a small screen, and have the most important information up front and center.
- Mobile speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on mobile devices. If customers are kept waiting for too long, they’ll move on to the next site.
- Desktop speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on desktop computers. It’s not just the strength of your customers’ web connection that determines speed, but also the elements of your website.
Some more technical users may recognize the results that this tool provides, as “the power behind the scores” is PageSpeed Insights, another Google tool which has been available since 2011 (originally called Page Speed Online).
mobile-friendly with PageSpeed Insights https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/making-your-site-more-mobile-friendly.html
Funnily enough it is powered by WebPageTest (which is awesome in itself) but I like visualizes that Google offers.
Weighing Costs
Performance issues can be expensive and time consuming to identify and resolve.
Usually businesses choose to use platforms, frameworks, and other pre-built assets because the cost and time required to create these tools themselves is prohibitive. This decision comes with a compromise that may not always be fully understood: by electing to use a pre-built tool, you’re assuming all the benefits and limitations of that tool. Not every tool, or every feature of every tool, is built with optimal performance in mind. Modifying core functionality of these tools to optimize performance may be expensive and time consuming.
As professionals, it is our responsibility to make our clients aware of every part of their business, even those elements which we may deem “unfixable” due to cost or timeline. We must be transparent when we present the viability of options, and provide options and recommendations, so our clients can make informed decisions.
I actually very much dislike this particular scanner as it is basically an AdWords marketing campaign. AFAIK this is just a stylized version of a and Mobile Friendly Test (https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly) which has a command line interface (https://github.com/addyosmani/psi and https://github.com/joeyhoer/psi/tree/mrt [yes, that is my fork for mobile friendly compatibility]) which means these tests can be easily automated.
The problem is the recommendations these tools provide are very difficult and costly to resolve on Magento. They concepts presented in these recommendations are well-understood, and we do take them into consideration during development; the fact is, these issues are an unfortunate product of the platform. Presenting these issues to a client without an adequate solution could be alarming, but perhaps it’s better that it comes from us than from someone else…
Send each client a report from Google Page Speed Insights and the Mobile Friendly Test along with recommended next steps Include an explanation of the level-of-effort to resolve issues By the way, you should really checkout out Page Speed Insight reports for:
While we can install an Magento extension for CSS and JS under the monthly, but that won’t minify HTML or address any assets loaded from the WordPress site. The client should not expect big performance wins from minification and concatenation—this is a minor optimization. Simplifying the theme to remove images and focusing on improving server-side caching and MySQL calls should have a larger impact on overall performance. Both options could be expensive & time consuming, so we should make recommendations as to the best investment they can make into performance optimization.
We could bundle a Performance Audit with the Load Testing project we’ll be proposing, and provide all the recommendations at one time, or we can execute the projects separately. If they want us to scope out a Performance Audit project which analyzes performance and ultimately provides them with valuable recommendations for performance improvements, we can do that.