With no-one on staff having formal performance engineering experience or training, I led the effort to address a 6s sitewide page load average. Over approx. 6 months, stealing time from each sprint as I could given other responsbilities, I assessed bottlenecks using performance tools, including procuring a contract for Insights, Browser Pro, and Synthetics.
In a nutshell, assessing some of the pages having a roughly 13s page load, skewing the overall site’s average, I determined that the bulk of the performance issues were in blocking JS libs and then crafted a remediation strategy and established SMART goals for baselining/measuring impact of changes quarter-over-quarter with intent to drop from 6s to 3.5s by the end of 2017. Below you’ll see a spreadsheet I kept, noting the average Page Load Speed every Monday morning. Finally, in May, we address the bulk of the blocking JS libs and reversed the upwards trend.
The CEO was amazed at how much faster the site felt.
Results
- Intro’d performance engineering, leading to page load speed reduction by one full second and 11% bump in mobile web conversions.
