Why do fast websites matter?

The problem with many of today's websites

As people get better internet speeds, both developers and website suppliers (and end customers, for that matter) get spoiled and focus less on this. A 10 MB page sounds, with today's data plans and fibre speeds, like no problem at all (for some), while 10–20 years ago it was a complete crisis.

Here are some of our thoughts on why a focus on speed can pay off:

1. Not all customers are necessarily in Norway on a good connection.
   Norwegians like to travel. And perhaps you also have customers from abroad? In addition, there are some rather important robots measuring page speeds from all over the world.
2. Customers value brands with fast websites more highly.
3. Even for customers with good connections, being a notch faster is an extreme competitive advantage.
   You might think that since the website is up within 800 milliseconds, nobody is so impatient that it is a problem, but statistics from Amazon, for example, show that every 100ms of extra load time leads to 1% fewer sales (source: Greg Linden, Amazon). That can be quite significant sums. Yahoo has also reported that a 400ms slower page leads to 5–9% more users abandoning before the page has finished loading (source: Nicole Sullivan, Yahoo!).
4. People are extremely sensitive to how snappy a website is
   Think of it like how good people are at forming first impressions of new people. As Malcolm Gladwell says in his book Blink: "There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis." Seconds, in other words, are slow motion. Do not underestimate the importance of milliseconds.
5. You feel your own website is fast, but have you measured?
   What are your ambitions, and your competitors' ambitions? Are you content to drift in the same territory as other moderately fast sites, or do you want to draw competitive advantage from being the one that is a notch snappier? If so, it usually requires a bit more trimming of page load than you think. Do you want to be "decent", or do you want to stand apart from the rest by going a few steps further?
6. Environmental friendliness matters a bit too, right?
   Who doesn't want a sustainable focus in their business, actively working both to reduce emissions related to their own company and to champion healthy values and a focus on stepping up where others don't care?
   The fact is that heavier websites require more data transfer, both from your own servers and for end customers. Active servers sending lots of data require lots of electricity. (By the way, do your servers run on renewable energy?) End customers' computers/tablets/phones use more power processing heavy pages, and use more data from their internet providers, which in turn requires more electricity (a chain reaction).
   It is of course easy to sweep this under the rug and think there are bigger problems to solve, but the same could be said about plastic straws being banned. Surely that has minimal significance in the big picture? Or is it precisely in all the small steps you can take that big differences actually lie? We believe the latter. All effort directed towards sustainability is good effort in our view, and it most likely supports both your company's long- and short-term strategy and goals.

So what do I need to do?

First and foremost, you need an overview of the status of your own site. Nobody is perfect, and this is continuous work, not a checkbox that can be ticked off with a few quick developer hours.

Much page speed optimisation often lies in the space between marketing needs and usability. Average websites in 2021 have tracking scripts from both Facebook and Google, and often screen recording services and the like. These are often important tools for developing websites further, but you must also seriously weigh exactly how critical they are, and at what price.

Furthermore, it is common to add "render blocking" scripts – that is, the script MUST load before the rest of the page appears. Good alternatives can be to start loading the page without them, and bring in tracking afterwards (if there is time for it). This risks not capturing 100% of the data (which tracking companies dislike), but gives a substantially better experience for customers. Is this a compromise your marketing department is willing to make? Developers cannot make all these choices alone – things must be discussed and weighed together.

The 80% rule

You can relatively quickly reach an 80% "good enough for many" scenario with your website, but the last 20% usually takes as much time and effort (or more) as the first 80%. It is important to be aware of this in discussions with developers and suppliers. What may seem like small tasks are not always what you think.

For example, there are very simple steps to make sure the 20 MB images a web editor uploads are automatically compressed down to 1 MB and still look almost as good. You have then easily improved the size of the initial load by 19 MB, and probably gone from page speed rankings at deep-red level to yellow. In these phases you can make big moves in simple ways and get a long way. But as soon as you start hovering around the 80% mark, and most of the usual steps have been taken, the solution is no longer to just "compress" things more. That degrades the quality of images, video and other content on the site, and carries many problems of its own. (Pixelated product photos sell poorly.)

So you must, for example, think fundamentally differently about how images are displayed to climb further up the results. You can create specially adapted sizes of the image optimised for the end user's device, use more modern image formats with new compression technology (WebP and the like), and use CDN networks to deliver images as close to the end user as possible. At the same time you can implement smart caching so resources already loaded earlier are not loaded again. These are just a handful of possible steps, but the point remains: the simple solution that bore great fruit in earlier phases will no longer be the solution for taking the next steps. So you must keep in mind, for both budgets and timelines, that if you want to do something *properly* well, you must be prepared for the effort required.

How does Vasser differ from other suppliers?

We aim higher than "good enough". We go the extra steps, because we believe it is worth it for the client (who should get better returns on their investment), for our own sake (good craftsmanship is rewarding, and makes us happy to work), and most importantly for the end customer, who will experience the very best and most efficient websites and benefit from it.

We know we are not perfect, and it is not possible on every project to stretch as far as on others, but we strive to raise the bar for how – and how fast – websites should be, and to ensure progress does not mean leaning on newer and faster internet lines, but taking responsibility for absolutely all customers, including those not on fibre!