Why Care About Web Performance

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>> Let's dive in and start on part one, understanding. We're gonna look at three things as part of part one. First, we're gonna talk about psychology a little bit. We're gonna do a psycho 101 course, specifically about how people think about performance. And I'm gonna give you some homework, some exercises that we're gonna do together.

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So that you can understand what those performance mean, and how does that tie into the metrics that we're going to attach. Then we're gonna talk about those metrics. We're gonna talk about measuring that performance, and the different aspects of how fast the site is. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about statistics.

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And we're gonna look at how you think about the data that you collect from those metrics. All right, why is performance important? Clearly, a whole bunch of you think it's important because you're here today with me, but objectively why do we care? And it would be remiss of me not to point out the plethora of studies out there from lots of different organizations to talk about.

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Hey, we improved load time of our site by one second and we got 2% more revenue. Yep, that's great. Or another site that says, hey, we rose our conversion rate by 18% by dropping our load times cool or CloudFlare, saying, hey, here's all of these sites. And when you hit these different load times your conversion rates go up and down by various different percentiles.

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Of course, these are all companies and consultancies and products that build their brands on performance and helping you do performance. So you got to take all of these studies with a little bit of grain of salt. And any chart you see about this, you do need to kind of consider here's a chart that I really like.

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Now, this is a chart that plots the global average temperature versus the number of pirates in the world. And we see that there's a direct correlation that as the number of pirates has fallen, the global temperature has gone up. And so clearly this means that global warming is caused by our lack of pirates.

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But of course, that's ridiculous because we need to remember as we see these statistics. The correlation is not the same thing as causation and that these are very complex systems that we're talking about. And usually there's no one metric that perfectly correlates with or that perfectly causes another.

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And so, anytime we're thinking about this, we have to bring some skepticism to it and critically analyze our thinking. All right, more important than those studies are two very important reasons the performance is important. And the first is because Google says so. And that's really important because whether we like it or not, Google owns a big portion of the Internet.

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And they have stated that coming this year in 2021, they are going to break your sites base on your performance course. And so if you have bad performing sites, starting this year, you're gonna start losing customers, losing clicks directly from Google search results, which is a big deal.

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It's a really big deal, it's going to make or break a lot of companies, a lot of, Travel websites. Is gonna break a lot of content sites that put too many ads on their screen. It's probably gonna break some advertising providers that can't get their stuff out fast enough.

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But focusing on performance, especially right now, is really, really important and so I'm glad you're all here. Google cares about this a lot, for the same reason, you should care about this a lot and that's the second reason we care about performance. It's because angry and frustrated users, because you're taking too long to show them their stuff, won't stick around long.

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If your site's a low value thing, like a content site, they might leave they might go, I'm gonna do something else. If it's a high value, like a service and application they're in, they're gonna slowly look for alternatives or a competitor might come along, and if they can be a little bit faster, you'll lose them.

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This is why Google thinks it's really important to rank your sites this way and why your business is gonna be dependent on how fast you can get your app to perform.