Performance – How high is it on your priority list?
Studies show that every additional 1 second in page load time results in a 7% loss in conversion. If you are running an e-commerce site, slow page loads directly affect your revenue. This isn’t big news. But how do you go about addressing performance issues?
Optimising your site to load faster isn’t as easy as it sounds. Modern web applications are complex pieces of software, living in an immensely complex environment. Bottlenecks can form at many points along the production line. The symptoms are easy to detect, but what about the cause?
Luckily there are tools available that help dig deep in to your application, exposing slow processes and connections.
New Relic is one such tool. It lets you trace requests from the client all the way to the server and back, showing your customers network and browser rendering speed as well as your applications response times broken down by category. By aggregating all of the raw data and rendering it in chart format, it allows us, as humans, to identify suspicious patterns and spikes in performance. Or lack of performance as it were.
With accurate analytics in hand the problems are far easier to track down and resolve. In most cases the culprit is as simple as a less than optimal database query, or a slow call to a third party service.
Solved the most obvious problems? Working on rolling out new features? Don’t forget to keep an eye on your performance metrics. That self-updating news ticker that you just rolled out could be overloading your servers if your visitors leave their browser tabs open.
Websites, just like everything else that we rely on daily, require a certain amount upkeep. Without preventative maintenance your application could leave you high and dry. How much would a day of down time cost you?
