16 Important Website Performance Metrics

If you value your user’s time, then you should, without any sluggishness, optimise your website on industry-specified website performance metrics. Below are some insights that may surprise you.

• Only a second delay in page loading speed can reduce customer satisfaction by 16%.
• Around 48% of people do not revisit a website if they encounter poor performance.
• A website that takes more than four seconds to load loses 25% of potential buyers.

We hope, by now you are not only convinced but serious about the website’s performance.

Your business’s reputation and brand value depend on the quality of customer experience. The UI, UX, meaningful content, website performance, etc all affect the CX. In this blog, you will get to know about crucial performance metrics you should care about to delight your customers/users.

How Can You Judge Website Performance?

There are quite many website performance metrics. Enough to confuse you about which ones should be given priority. Being in the business for 18+ years, We have published a series of articles to help you understand web development design:

1. Web Development After 18+ Years (Part 1): Don’t Make Dark Patterns
2. Web Development After 18+ Years: In E-commerce (Part 2)
3. Web Development After 18+ Years: Secrets of a Website (Part 3)

Therefore, I have curated the list of sixteen crucial metrics with the help of the development team.

Modern web development is unimaginable without frameworks. But the frameworks by themselves are not the holy grail for performance. Often, they increase the size of JavaScript bundles and affect the loading speed. These performance metrics help in analysing the source of problems. These might be related to frameworks, faults in the code, non-optimized code, slow servers, overusing animations & images, or poor User Interfaces.

There are many tools available to gauze the performance. Some of these are Google page speed insights, Uptrends, GT Metrix, Google Chrome Dev Tools, etc. Let us start with something you shouldn’t dare to ignore-Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vital Metrics

Google’s web vitals measures the performance of a page on how well it delivers the User Experience. Within it, they have highlighted three core web vitals. It is done to help non-developers like marketers, business owners and designers to observe the performance without much relying on optimization experts. Google’s web vitals can change over time as Google updates its algorithm frequently. These metrics provide a good threshold for visual stability, interactivity and loading.

1. Long Contentful Paint (LCP)

Long Contentful Paint (LCP) is a crucial site performance metric that helps assess the loading experience of the users. LCP inspects the loading time of the largest content of your website. For example, large content can be an image, video, header text, etc. The websites that load the largest content quickly feature excellent user satisfaction.

On the other hand, a low LCP score of a website suggests that you need to work on improving the loading speed. In most cases, reducing the content size helps in faster loading. For example, a large image may take a long time to load. Reducing the resolution and dimension of the image can help in faster loading.

In most cases, video content takes a long time to load on a website. The website owners should find a professional web hosting server to enhance loading speed. However, uploading multiple videos will eventually make your website slow. Instead of uploading the video, website owners should embed the videos after uploading them on YouTube or other video-sharing platforms.

2. First Input Delay (FID)

The First Input Delay (FID) refers to the time between the user initiating an input and the website giving an output. For example, people visit various e-commerce web stores nowadays to purchase multiple goods. How fast can you add a product to the cart? How can you get product information by clicking on a button?

Does user experience improve when users receive a faster response from the website? Nobody wants to wait a long time to receive an output. Therefore, a faster website response helps eCommerce stores convert leads into buyers. Nevertheless, a good experience often brings back the buyers. As a result, the overall customer retention rate of a website improves.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

The cumulative layout shift (CLS) is another website performance metric that measures the unexpected movement of the website components. In other words, web designers and core vitality inspection experts gauge page stability through this metric.

You may have seen many websites that quickly move objects from one place to another during loading. The movement of the elements on the website interface happens due to web design flaws. Such faulty website layout designs can lead to losing visitors and potential buyers.

Most online buyers trust websites that feature excellent stability. Therefore, user experience increases when a website does move too many objects while loading.

Additional Website Performance Metrics

Besides the core web vitals discussed above, experts consider some more web vitals to judge the performance and user experience. Considering the following web vitals is essential to optimize the website’s performance.

4. Time to First Byte (TTFB): Time to the first byte refers to the time between pressing a keyboard switch to view the output on the website. A short time between the input and output indicates better website performance. People will love to visit such websites due to a marginal TTFB.

5. First Contentful Paint (FCP): Above we mentioned the long contentful paint (LCP). Equally crucial is the first contentful paint to assess the website performance. FCP is the time a website takes to feature content on the interface first. The fast appearance of the first content indicates the website’s excellent loading speed. Therefore, the user experience will be satisfactory on such websites.

6. Total Blocking Time (TBT): The Total Blocking Time (TBT) is the time of the website’s response to an input from the visitors. Every visitor wants a quicker response from the website; thus, this crucial metric is essential to optimize website performance.

7. Full-Page Loading Time: How long does a particular web page take to load? The loading time depends on many factors, such as content type, size, server speed, etc. Typically, the loading time should not exceed two seconds, as people do not like to wait more than 3-4 seconds during website loading. You need to optimize the website’s design, framework, and content if a page’s total loading speed is high. Choosing a good web hosting server can also improve your page loading speed.

Website’s User Experience Metrics

You can judge the website’s user experience by multiple metrics. The user experience metrics can help you to optimize the website’s performance. In the following section, you will find a guide to assessing those websites’ user experience metrics.

8. Retention Rate

Retention rate is a clear indicator of the success of your business. Every business wants loyal customers, which is crucial for improving brand value and revenue. A high retention rate of an online store ensures that the website offers an excellent user experience.

However, the retention rate does not entirely indicate the user experience. People repeat their purchases when they find good products. Many buyers compromise with the user experience when they find the products are suitable to their requirements and expectations.

9. Session Duration

Session duration refers to the time a person spends on a website. The experts inspect the average session duration to know how visitors spend time on your website. The online stores sell more products or services with a longer session duration.

The low average session duration suggests people do not like spending much time on your website. Such things can happen due to many reasons. For example, website content may not be informative, and thus people do not spend time on the website.

Slow loading speed also affects the average session duration. Some more problems that affect session duration are broken links, complicated web interface, poor web navigation, etc.

10. Conversion Rate

Bringing website traffic is an aftermath of a meticulous marketing strategy. But, fetching high traffic does not assure satisfactory sales revenue for online businesses. It would help if you converted the visitors into buyers.

0.1 second fast load time can increase the conversion rates. It rose to 8% for retail websites and 10% for travel sites. Milliseconds Make Millions Report

The best way to convert visitors into buyers is by providing them with a good experience. Nevertheless, you should have informative web content to encourage visitors to purchase something on your website. Another crucial thing is giving all the information about the products transparently. Customers hate if their time is wasted on finding a return policy or there are hidden costs or shipping costs are manipulated at the checkouts.

The product pages should include various photographs to ensure the customer knows what the actual product will look like. Nowadays, a 360-degree view of a product often helps web visitors convert into buyers. Additionally, you can use Augmeneted Reality for businesses to enhance the customer experience. You should also ensure that product images and videos load quickly, as a slow loading speed leads to a low conversion rate.

11. DNS Lookup Speed

You may have heard about DNS lookup time and speed, though you do not have any formal idea about it. What does the DNS lookup speed mean? The term refers to the amount of time a Domain Name System (DNS) provider takes to translate a domain name into an IP address. Therefore, website owners must choose a fast and effortless DNS provider for a high DNS lookup speed.

So, how can you check the DNS lookup speed of your website? The experts typically use various tools to check the DNS look time. You can use online tools like DNSPerf where you have to copy-paste the domain name to check the lookup speed and time.

12. Error Rate of Your Website

Your website’s error rate is an important factor for inspecting errors on your website within a given period. The website visitors may encounter errors due to many reasons. Server glitches are the commonest reasons in such cases, though errors occur depending on many other factors.
A website with a low error rate is more user-friendly. Ideally, the error rate should be zero if you want to deliver an effortless user experience to visitors and buyers. But, you cannot ignore the errors at times due to many technical reasons. Therefore, website owners should ensure that error rates remain negligible.

13. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after checking only one page. Typically, the bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of single-page visitors by the total number of visits to your website.

A high bounce suggests that more people have left your website without checking other pages. Taking the visitors to different website pages is crucial to improving the conversion rate. When a visitor spends time on your website, he becomes a potential buyer. A high bounce suggests your website fails to convert visitors into potential buyers.

Multiple factors can affect the bounce rate of your website. For example, a slow page-loading speed can affect the bounce rate. It would be best to improve the loading speed to reduce the bounce rate. On the other hand, the website interface also impacts the bounce rate. People like to spend time on a visually appealing website.

Therefore, obtaining high website traffic is futile if the bounce rate is high. Web development experts take various measures to reduce the bounce rate by optimizing multiple features. For example, adding a call-to-action (CTA) button, serving content that users actually want to see, etc.

14. Time to Title

The time to title refers to the amount of time your website takes to load the main page titles. Whenever you load a website on a browser, you will find that the website takes a little time to appear on your screen. Typically, the lighter elements of the website load quicker than the heavier elements.

The text content will appear earlier than the image and video content of the website. You will notice different types of website texts. For example, you will find a title or heading loads slower than the regular text. The loading time of the titles should be reduced to improve the website’s performance.

15. Time to Start Render

Another crucial website performance metric is the time to start rendering. How much time does your website take to begin content loading? A website that starts content loading faster will load quicker than other websites. Therefore, the time to start rendering is important to improve the loading speed of your website.

Experts often check this factor when they find a low website conversion rate. Nowadays, everyone has access to a high-speed internet connection. Therefore, web visitors expect quicker loading speed from the websites. The bounce rate of your website will increase if you have a low time to start rendering metrics.

16. Time to Interact

The time to interact is another crucial parameter to judge a website’s performance. Most websites come with interactive features for visitors. For example, the call-to-action button is an interactive feature of a website. The button should load quickly to obtain input from the website visitor. Overall, a web visitor’s user experience improves if the interactive features of a website load quickly.

Another example of an interactive feature is adding products to the shopping cart. The buyers expert that add-to-cart feature loads with the product. Your conversion rate will be low if there is a problem with add-to-cart button loading.

What is the next step?

So, these are the significant performance metrics that will help you cement your online business. Ultimately, the goal is to provide an excellent customer experience to build an unshakeable trust in your services. Gauzing and observing these metrics may seem time-consuming but this never-ending task will help you not deviate from focusing on your users.

We have covered a few important metrics in this blog. Moreover, if you need the guidance of skilled developers and designers to optimize our website or app. Then my team will gladly perform a comprehensive audit of your website and deliver a hyper-optimized one. Take our web development services. We are fast, friendly and won’t eat your pockets.