What Is Web Performance?

Chapter 1. What Is Web Performance?

Simply put, web performance is an indication of the time it takes your online experience to load for your customers. Perception of performance is, just like it sounds, how long it seems your experience took to load—but the nuance there is that you can conceal a large amount of inherent latency by making the experience as available and interactive as possible, as soon as possible, while asynchronously loading in the longer tail parts of the experience. Another aspect of performance is runtime performance, which is an indication of how smoothly your application runs after it has loaded on your customer’s machine—think scrolling that stutters or buttons that aren’t immediately responsive.

If any or all of these are lacking, it makes your site feel unprofessional and is a direct reflection on your organization and your company. It also can be a drag on your larger organizational goals.

As technology leaders, we have organizational goals that are tied to larger business objectives. Maybe we are leading our company’s digital transformation, minimizing elements of interactions either through enhanced customer self-service, or via full automation. Or, maybe we are tasked with improving brand perception. Whatever the case, we need to keep track of and, more important, seek to influence many different key performance indicators (KPIs) around these goals.

Web performance, and its close sibling, perception of performance, has a direct impact on Net Promoter ...