WPO – Web Performance Optimization

What is WPO – Web Performance Optimization?

WPO – Web Performance Optimization – consists of a set of advanced techniques for optimizing the performance and speed of a website aimed at achieving better results in terms of load speed and user experience, as well as optimizing the performance and resource consumption of the systems and servers used. WPO will improve the effectiveness of any website.

In Ecode we have a team of experts in technical and optimized web development, specialized in WPO and making very fast web pages.

Advantages of a very fast website

The first thing we have to take into account when evaluating possible advantages of having a fast website, is that our users are people. People are often very impatient, and with technology even more so. In addition, the vast majority of those of us who have been using technology for years have had bad experiences with slow technologies or technologies that did not work at all.

For this reason we know that, for many people, slow technology is bad technology. On the other hand, we must take into account that our users do not always have optimal conditions of Internet connection or a device capable of loading many resources quickly to paint a web page.

The most common benefits of getting a fast website:

1. Increase average page views and interactions per session
   Being faster, our users will consume more and better our content. We will be able to generate, for example, more ad impressions, more average time per session, more time consulting our services or products or, in short, better visibility and browsing experience on our website.
2. Reduces the bounce rate on all pages
   All the research and tests done by us and other experts who share their studies, confirm that the faster we are in showing our content and loading our page, the lower the percentage of users who leave the website without visiting a second page of the site.
3. Improve conversion and boost the results of your website
   Most of the websites we have optimized over the years have been Internet businesses. As in most businesses, the effectiveness in making sales or achieving goals is critical.
   In digital businesses, where we have many metrics, conversion is one of the factors we are always looking to improve when working on optimizing and achieving goals.
4. Increase the visibility of your product or service
   Most online marketing strategies aimed at improving the visibility of any product or service depend on possible entries or links to our website. Get to improve your visibility, not only in search engine positioning strategies, but in any strategy that may depend on the performance of your website (Email marketing, PPC – Pay Per Click, Social Media, etc.).
5. Improve the user experience – UX – by being very fast
   The user experience on a website depends on different factors such as the design of the interfaces or the quality of the content. Without a doubt, one of the key factors in guaranteeing an optimal user experience is the speed of the website.
6. Reduce your users waiting time
   And increase the time a user spends on your content.
7. Optimize performance for your users, including mobile devices or smartphones
   Optimize performance for your users, including mobile devices or smartphonesIt is important to take into account all the scenarios and conditions in which we can find our users. In the last decade we have seen how both the use of mobile phones to use the Internet and the use of mobile networks in which the speed conditions are not always optimal have burst in. Making sure that our website works in the best possible way in different scenarios can be crucial to making our project more effective.
8. Reduce traffic and data consumption of the server and systems required
   By using optimal systems and technologies in our server we can achieve a drastic reduction in server utilization for each of our visitors. Optimized server caching systems adapted to every need will allow us to save a lot of work on our hosting.
9. Reduce the cost of hosting your web traffic
   Taking into account the previous point and adding that one of our objectives will be to reduce to the maximum the weight of the resources that we need to send to each user to show our page, we will manage to reduce in a notorious way the cost in infrastructures or hosting.
10. Improve the performance in the countries and geographical areas of your users
    One of the most neglected aspects of speed nowadays is the difference in performance of our website depending on the geographical location of our visitors. For many businesses on the Internet it is important to have what we technically know as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This network allows us to reduce the download times and latency of the resources of our pages to achieve optimal speed, regardless of the location of our potential customers.

Main loading metrics of a web page

In WPO we have many metrics that allow us to better understand the speed of a website, and how it can affect – positively or negatively – the user experience that may depend on the loading speed of the page content. Below are some of the main metrics we work on.

To try to understand them better, most metrics that have time as a unit of measurement indicate the amount of time that passes from the time a user accesses a page on our website until different targets or stages required to display the content of the requested page are reached.

• TTFB – Time to First Byte
  It’s the time it takes for our server to start responding to our content request. In other words, the time it takes for the server to get ready to send the content. It can be affected by slow times in database requests, slow programming processes, etc.
• FCP – First Contentful Paint
  Time it takes for the device that has requested our website to paint the first part of the top content. In other words, how long it takes a user to start viewing any type of content (text, images, etc.).
• LCP – Largest Contentful Paint
  Time that marks when the largest content element or resource on the page has been loaded. Sometimes we find problems with very heavy resources in some pages.
• FID – First Input Delay
  This metric is important for measuring the feeling of speed that our users can perceive because it allows us to know the time that the page has taken to process and react to the first user interaction (clicking a link, touching a button, displaying a menu, etc.).
• TTI – Time to Interactive
  Time it takes for the web to become interactive or available for any user interaction. This metric is very important nowadays since, as our director Javier Martínez Seco says “in the last years many developers and big websites have become aware of the importance of delivering the content quickly and painting it as soon as possible, neglecting the more than possible fast user interaction once they have the possibility to see the content”. This behavior can generate a negative experience. Our users interact with the content, but the device they are using is still “assembling” the content of the page and makes it not work, even if you touch it. This happens because at that moment the page, despite being “painted”, is not interactive for the user because the device is busy processing content or scripts.
• TBT – Total Blocking Time
  This metric was born from the need to measure the amount of time the browser on the device the user is using “spends” analyzing resources or tasks needed to process all the page content. To consider a task as “wasting” time, the time of each task that exceeds 50ms (5 hundredths of a second) is taken into account. The TBT tells us the amount of time accumulated from all the tasks that exceed 50ms.
• CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift
  This metric aims to measure how many times a user “suffers” movements in the content when painting. There are many pages that, for example when browsing with our mobiles, are painted and, once you start reading that content, it moves through the very construction of the page. The CLS measures by accumulating the percentage of movement that the content undergoes when being painted and in the process of building the page.