Does Your Site’s Speed Meet Visitor Expectations and Industry Standards?

Speed is the new website currency: If you want more visitors and higher search engine rankings, then your site has to be fast—most visitors become impatient after two seconds of load time. But improving site speed can be overwhelming, as tools and tips to improve website performance can get overly technical, often requiring multiple teams with different skillsets to work together. With user-centric audits, easy-to-understand visualizations, and clear explanations, you have everything you need to improve your site’s speed.

Monitor performance for multiple visitor profiles to understand how they experience your site

Easily assess performance by seeing how visitors experience your site

Research has shown that you have less than three seconds to engage a visitor before they leave your site. But it can be difficult to know if your pages are engaging in that amount of time. With Siteimprove Performance, you know how your site is doing according to industry standards with Google’s Lighthouse performance scores. You can also see visual records of what a page looks like while it's loading combined with a performance timeline and benchmark statistics on when visitors typically abandon a page to assess your site’s performance and identify bottlenecks.

Identify website performance opportunities that have the greatest impact on load time

Not all performance issues have the same impact on page speed. The number of elements required to load a page and the visitor's proximity to your web server both have a high impact on your page load time. The majority of load time is spent downloading different parts of a page. See where your page elements are stored and identify third-party elements that are slowing down your site. From there, you can work on reducing the number of requests and bringing page elements closer to your visitors.

Get guidance on how to communicate, delegate, or fix performance issues

Unifying all teams working on your digital customer experience can be challenging, even more so when there are external agencies involved. Visual and easy to understand data build a common language around web performance. Shareable audits and detailed recommendations organized by task owner and difficulty level support you in communicating or delegating improvements to your extended teams or agencies.

Visitor Profiles

Your page loads differently depending on a visitor’s location, network, and device. With Visitor Profiles, you can choose a combination of settings that simulate the conditions your visitors face:

  • Measure performance from multiple countries: Monitor your sites from your visitors' locations to ensure a consistent fast loading experience.
  • Measure performance on different network speedsMonitor your sites using different network speeds. Not all your customers have access to the same network speeds – some use 3G, while others use slow cable internet, which affects how they see your page load.
  • Optimize performance for mobile: About half of daily internet time is spent on a mobile device. Make sure your site loads fast on mobile, and you’ll ensure it loads quickly from any device.

Lighthouse Score & Progress Graph

Assessing site speed becomes easier when you know what the standards for your industry are. Built by Google, Lighthouse is an open-source auditing tool for developers. Your Siteimprove Performance score will help you see if your performance lives up to Google’s standards. Once you remove performance bottlenecks, you can see your progress over time in a progress graph.

Visitor Loading Experience & Performance Timeline

See how your visitors experience your site with visual records of what the page looks like while it's loading. User-centric performance metrics provide better insight into your visitors’ experience as your site loads:

  • First Contentful Paint (FCP): When the browser renders the first bit of content (e.g. text, an image, or page elements)
  • First Meaningful Paint (FMP): When the primary content loads (e.g. the main video, text, or image)
  • Time to Interactive (TTI): Time when visitors are able to perform an action

These metrics are combined in a performance timeline with benchmark statistics on when visitors typically abandon a page—helping you make a case for why improving loading times of specific pages should be a priority.

Asset Location Map

Your site is composed of many elements (images, scripts, etc.), but these assets are often stored on different servers. The distance between your servers and your visitors has a direct impact on your site’s performance. The Asset Map shows where the different elements of your page are stored so you can bring these elements closer to your visitors.

Session Replay Video

To understand the importance of a delay of even one second, you need you put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Understand your visitors’ behavior by watching your page load sequence. Session Replay Video captures everything visitors see while the page is loading, so you get the visibility you need to pinpoint defects, improve performance, and foster collaboration between team members.

Actionable & Shareable Recommendations

Get a simplified overview of a page’s issues, including difficulty level and who should be responsible for fixing them. Understanding how difficult an issue is to fix and who has the expertise to fix it, helps you prioritize and delegate tasks and improve cross-team communication. If you work with an external agency, you can share the technical details of an issues to ease communication.