A better perceived performance and thus user experience, will result in higher conversion and thus revenue.
Reasons to look out for hosting/server which fits your needs, build in the right framework but also follow Google's recommendations and read their diagnostics when analysing your pages. With emphasis on your First Meaningful Paint and soon to be Largest Contentful Paint metric.
In this Proof of Concept, I optimized loading process of a Belsimpel.nl productpage. This has huge influence on the First Meaningful Paint metric within a Lighthouse or even PageSpeed Insights analysis.
Why focussing on user experience / First Meaningful Paint
Some reasons why you want to focus on the First Meaningful Paint metric to optimize initial user experience:
- Your potential customers could be on holiday while doing online shopping;
- Your customers could be in the train, using the train's wifi (although I don't hope so for security reasons);
- They could be on the way, in the car, cab or bus, travelling through regions where fast internet is not that common;
- They could live near the border, unexpectedly using another provider (I grew up near Germany, unwillingly using German providers);
- They may have chosen a provider or subscription which fits their budget, but may cut their internet speed when exceeding fair usage policy (I didn't know we still had those subscriptions in the Netherlands);
- They may be using old operating system and/or browser, thus not having the newest software;
- They may not have the newest phone and thus optimal hardware/CPU, making them the perfect fit for shopping online at belsimpel.nl.
In the case of Belsimpel, focussing on this FMP metric, may result in the following, where the First Meaningful Paint will show up within 6.4 seconds when travelling, and after optimizing it will show up within 1.8 seconds. That's a perceived performance of about 3,5 times faster.
Want to see more? Checkout my other loading-time Proof of Concepts.
