What is Performance?
How fast your website is! There’s tons of metrics that capture the user experience, Google focuses on six. Read about them here.
Using other third party tools, you can choose to focus on other metrics (Time to First Byte, Long Javascript tasks, etc), but for today we’ll focus on Google since it’s free and easy to start with.
What is Google Lighthouse/Core Web Vitals/Performance Score?
Google Lighthouse is a testing tool Google provides to assess the performance of your website. There are 5 categories (explained in the above article), 6 core web vitals (above article), and those 6 web vitals are weighted to make up your performance score
Check out the weighting here. Sometimes people mention only 3 core web vitals. They are referring to the most important or highest weighted of the 6, which are CLS, LCP, and TBT.
What’s a good performance score?
The scale is out of 100, but don’t let that fool you. Picture a website that is a single blank webpage. No images, no text, no apps, no nav, no search. Just a blank page. That’s 100. Everything you add on top of that begins to ‘compromise’ the website.
Add to that the limitations of mobile scores, and data from 100 e-comm stores, and you begin to see the reality.
30-40 is a great score, 50+ is absolutely immense.
This is confirmed by the spread of Nacelle merchants, with most merchants falling in the 30s on mobile. The highest mobile performance score today is a 42.
So what do we do?
Don’t accept Google Lighthouse as the gospel truth for UX! For reasons explained here, an e-comm site is an ever-evolving balance between performance goals and third party apps/front-end features integral to UX/brand differentiation
Optimizing images, and how scripts load, are two common areas of low effort/big impact.
How do we test Lighthouse ourselves?
Lots of ways! You can download the extension, or use pagespeed insights (I recommend pagespeed insights, it is more consistent than lighthouse and focuses on performance).
Feel free to test competitor’s websites as well, to see how you stack up!
Notice how Google provides very specific recommendations to get your score up. It may take your agency a sprint or 2, but focusing on the low-hanging fruit, and making sure all deployments maintain or improve the new baseline, is a good strategy.
Bonus: If you want to estimate performance score improvements, Google has a tool for that! Check it out here.
What’s the number 1 recommendation Nacelle makes?
Images! By far and away, optimizing images is the number one recommendation we make. Both Next and Nuxt offer a native image component, which will automatically do most if not all of the work!
Optimizing images directly impacts 2 of the 3 core web vitals (LCP and CLS), as well as FCP.
This wasn’t enough, how do I get more information?
Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to set up a personalized performance review today!
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