subject: Page Load Time Is The Holy Grail [print this page] The need for online speed is well-documented through stats and stories of abandoned carts, visitors lost, brands tarnished. The rule today more than ever is that every millisecond of delay costs real money in lost revenue.
Speed is an elusive and moving target, in large part because of the tremendous complexity of Web pages today. Websites strive to create ever more engaging, interactive and visually dazzling experiences to satisfy users who expect to be impressed.
Its not dissimilar to the trajectory of desktop software (remember desktop software?) where, as computers gain more and more horsepower (thanks to the real Moores Law), software gets bloated at a slightly greater pace, ensuring that the hardware will always be taxed. So too, as broadband has gained speed and penetration, websites have put on more and more weight, perpetuating the struggle to meet users expectations for speed.
In a world where the blink of an eye means the difference between success and failure, site developers and owners face the ongoing challenge of shaving milliseconds anywhere they can and ensuring that their pages are delivered quickly no matter how many users are accessing their site or where in the world those users might be. Fortunately, new tools just introduced to the marketplace are designed to give site owners the data to do just that.
Theres always been a danger in performance management of getting caught up in the data and potentially forgetting what it means for the user. Page load time is the holy grail; its the number everyone looks at, the number everyone tries to shrink. But can a single number, representing a start-to-finish process, really reflect what the experience is like for the user on the other side of the browser?
The answers to those questions recently became a lot more accessible. The W3Cs Web Performance Working Group has released its Navigation Timing API, which collects timing data directly from within the browser, and provides visibility into each of the major phases that make up page load time. Its currently available in the latest releases of Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox.
Being able to see page performance at this more granular level enables two significant types of insight. First, it enables a more accurate understanding of what the site experience is for the user, which can be represented in ways that are important to the businessnot just IT. Second, it can help site developers and operations teams work together to shave precious milliseconds from users perceived wait times.
Not all of this data is new. For some time, Keynote has measured and reported critical page-load milestones such as URL redirect time, resource timing, etc. Operations teams have long used this information to tune their websites and correct performance issues. But collaborating with developers on problems impacting user experience was more difficult.
