With the arrival of the sales, your site is going to have to cope with a major traffic spike. As a result, it’s likely to experience some sluggishness.
Find out how to prevent them, and how to remedy them in the long term.
1. How to measure site speed
To quickly assess the speed of a website, you can run a test on WebPageTest.
You can select the browser you want to test from, the type of connection (DSL, 3G, cable, etc.) and the number of tests to run (we recommend running around ten tests to obtain reliable median results).
To get an idea of the results of your site in optimized version, you can run a second test with the URL YourDomainName.fasterized.com.
Note that this second test creates a simulation of your automatically optimized site. The configuration level is therefore basic.
If you were to automatically optimize your site, a special configuration could be created to further accentuate performance gains.
Other tools, such as GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights, can be used to test web performance. In addition to giving a score to your webperf, the latter tool will give you some useful advice on how to improve your score.
These first tools enable you to obtain a “score” at a given moment. To monitor your webperf over the long term, we recommend using RUM (Real User Monitoring) tools such as Webperf.io or Dareboost, Newrelic, Pingdom.
2. Better understanding of key metrics
Load Time is the overall loading time of a page on your site.
The Start Render is the moment when the white page gives way to the first elements of the web page.
The Speed Index measures the visual progression of parts of the page above the waterline and calculates an overall score indicating the rate at which the page is displayed on the screen. The lower the number, the faster the page is displayed.
Visually Complete indicates the moment when all visual elements of the page are displayed. It is to be distinguished from Load Time, which corresponds to the loading of the entire page (and goes beyond purely visual elements).
Time To First Byte is when your browser receives the first byte of code to be interpreted.
3. How to speed up your website?
To speed up a website, there are several good development practices (concatenation, lazyloading, minification, Gzip, compression, etc.).
These front-end optimizations can be carried out either by in-house technical teams, by software to be installed on your servers, or by SaaS software such as Fasterize. Each solution has its own advantages and disadvantages:
In-house development
Advantages: customization, responsiveness, flexibility.
Disadvantages: time spent by the technical team developing and maintaining web performance, special skills required, constant monitoring of changes in best practices to be followed and applied, adaptation to all browsers and devices.
Software to be installed on servers
Advantages: best practices applied immediately.
Disadvantages: requires installation and configuration time, technical expertise, maintenance.
SaaS solution
Advantages: quick and easy to set up, subject-matter expertise, constant evolution of the service, time-saving (rapid implementation), controlled cost (choice of a flat-rate package), no maintenance or operation by the customer.
Disadvantages: general solution (to be configured site by site).
Now you’re ready for the sales season.
Now all you have to do is get started!
Don’t hesitate to (re)read our article “4 tips for keeping up during the sales“.
