A redesign is the ideal opportunity to rethink your website with
‘web performance by design’ in mind, so that it loads quickly. This is precisely what Thomas Berger, CTO, did by making page load speed a central focus of the redesign project for Leparisien.fr. The effects of this strategy were visible from the moment the site launched, but they began to fade after just a few months. To understand why, and how to get back on track, Le Parisien called on Fasterize’s expertise to carry out a performance audit.
Fasterize: What made you decide to carry out a speed audit following your redesign?
Thomas Berger: We completely redesigned the online version of Le Parisien in July 2019. The site was based on a complex architecture that had had its day (some components were 10 years old!). The project began in early 2018, using the Washington Post’s
CMS, which is highly efficient and helps ensure pages load quickly. Improving our
PageSpeed
score was naturally one of our objectives, and we set a
performance budget
right from the start of the design phase to ensure the new site would, of course, be faster than the previous one. As a result, the Speed Index was reduced by over 60 per cent. We rose to the challenge with flying colours, but by autumn page speed had already begun to deteriorate. We’d managed to halve the First Contentful Paint and the First Meaningful Paint (the moment when the first ‘useful’ content for the user appears. editor’s note), and within a quarter, they had increased by 25 per cent. Another key indicator for us was the
JDN mobile web performance ranking. We’d gone from bringing up the rear to the top 10 thanks to our redesign, and we were starting to slip back down. I reacted quickly to stem the problem by commissioning Fasterize to carry out a
web performance audit. I wanted to focus on three key areas:
- Identify benchmark KPIs for our sector
- Benchmarking against competitors amongst online news sites
- Define the actions to be implemented to speed up our site, and which tools to use
Fasterize: How did you set your performance targets? Are the technical objectives linked to commercial or marketing objectives?
T. B.: Absolutely, it’s all connected! It’s crucial for us to have a high-quality
user experience, with pages that load quickly on both mobile and desktop to minimise the bounce rate and avoid losing audience. Subscriptions are a key focus for us; we can’t afford to undermine our commercial efforts with a high
churn
rate either. Another risk of a slow website is that subscribers will complain about paying for a substandard experience. Our website is also heavily reliant on SEO, which accounts for a significant proportion of our traffic. Thus, in a competitive sector such as the media, speed is key to helping us rank higher in search results relative to our ecosystem. Finally,
it is important to recognise that news websites have specific constraints, particularly relating to advertising. Advertising is essential, but it does have an impact on the user experience. To set realistic performance thresholds for our industry, it is best to
compare ourselves with the competition rather than setting KPIs with absolute values, as we face the same challenges.
Fasterize: What areas for improvement did the audit help you identify, and what lessons have you learnt from it?
T. B.: The audit enabled us to identify areas for improvement and to approach development in line with web performance best practice. There are numerous speed metrics, and navigating them can be tricky without the necessary expertise. Thanks to Fasterize, we’ve been able to prioritise KPIs and even consider custom metrics. Indeed, standard metrics such as the Speed Index
or FCP don’t always reflect the reality of media websites. We often need to measure specific events during page loading, taking into account the impact that various trackers and third-party elements may have. Internally, our aim was also to foster a web performance culture across all teams, by emphasising just how essential speed is to the user experience. Now, whenever we think about development or a new product, we also think about performance! The advice from web performance experts has enabled us to go far beyond simply recognising that “speed is important for a website”. The audit’s technical recommendations are very practical; they provide a solid foundation for optimising images, fonts
and more… We also weigh up the benefits against the risks before adding
third-party scripts, particularly for
A/B tests, where we tailor the integration depending on the requirements (synchronous or asynchronous, in the header or at the bottom of the page…) On the back-end
side, we’ve inherited the Washington Post’s infrastructure, which is highly efficient and includes a CDN to improve loading speed and content availability. The optimisations we’re rolling out mainly focus on the front-end.
Fasterize: How did you organise your teams to implement the recommendations from the Fasterize audit?
T. B.: Auditing our website’s speed with Fasterize has also enabled us to communicate effectively internally to demonstrate that web performance isn’t just a technical issue. In terms of organisation, we do not have any resources dedicated to web performance… because it is now integrated into all projects undertaken by the product and technical teams. We have decided not to impose fixed web performance KPIs for the time being, but instead we are focusing on a ‘best effort’
approach. Based on the audit’s recommendations, we have drawn up a roadmap, and the feature teams will be required to seek further support from Fasterize’s web performance consultants during the development phases. The technical teams now systematically engage with the product teams at an early stage to anticipate risks to performance and security. Once new features go live, we monitor them and their impact on loading speed. In terms of tools, we use Treo to run regular
Lighthouse
tests, and we monitor user-side performance using
Real User Monitoring
tools. All in all, this web performance audit has helped us to truly establish a culture of performance across all teams, and we intend to maintain it in the long term!
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