We build beautiful applications, rich in content and functionalities, with the goal to attract more customers. At the same time, we run into a familiar performance problem. Apps and websites are loading slow; customers abandon using those services, sales declines, and expensive taskforces waste too much money for troubleshooting on production. In this post, I will give you an overview why performance matters.
Performance is key to engage customers
Financial institutions trying to push their customers to use online banking services, shops are creating e-commerce platforms, and social media platforms are trying to reach their audience. The common goal is to attract more customers by providing the services 24×7. At the same time, they reduce their internal efforts because such IT-based services work much cheaper.
There is no doubt that performance has a significant role in any business nowadays because fast-loading applications engage customers better than slow loading ones.
Forward-Thinking IT leaders understood that performance is an asset and the opposite is a liability. Too many competitors provide similar services, and if your customer-facing IT services are not reliable you will experience significant losses.
Performance enables conversions
Advertisement on different channels can bring more customers to your websites. This first step is simple and just a question of how much money you spend on those ads. However, it is worthless if you can’t keep those new users arriving at your site and drive them to buy your products. Therefore, conversion of users is critical for your business and performance is your instrument which plays a vital role.
Think about your last online shopping trip. You’ve arrived at an impressive portal, started the search for the intended product, but after 10 seconds the web page is still not presenting the search result. I assume that you will close this web portal and continue shopping on another, more reliable site. Such scenarios are common.
Performance impacts your revenue. Use my performance impact calculator to find out how a performance push could affect your business.
Performance is the foundation of User Experience
Websites loads tons of code into the browser before the first visual element gets displayed. You can feel this if your network connection is slow or when your device is overloaded with too many other activities. You sit in front of a greyed-out screen, and nothing happens. This is the terrible moments for both, the frustrated user who waits for the page to load and for the owner of this website because chances that this unsatisfied user will abandon and never return are more than 50 percent.
So many conditions can draw a negative impact on your user experience. Starting from bad application design, network speed, device resource utilization and several more. As a good practice, it’s highly recommended to consider user experience early in the development chain and set measures in place to check performance regularly during DEV, QA, and Ops.
The performance check below has been created with lighthouse and provides an excellent overview of how real customer experiences the webpage.
Performance is a primary function for all humans
Internet access and mobile devices is no longer a luxury good. Both are globally available, and IT leaders have realized that they can utilize this for another push in revenue. Retail shops and other players promote all kind of goods in their webshop.
There is AliExpress for instance which ships cheap products from Asia to Europe for almost nothing, which is significant competition for local shops in Europe. Elementary services such as emergency hotlines provide their services online. It’s our joint responsibility to build websites in a way which delivers the desired function fast and reliable for all humans.
Strategies for better performance
You’ve learned now why performance is everyone’s matter. Keep it in your mind once you build or change your next product.
In a few days, I will write another post on pragmatic performance considerations.
Keep doing the good things!