2.26 Incorporate Performance Testing Into Each Major Release-Cycle
Try to ethically measure how efficient a visitor’s experience is by analyzing the performance of the website or application and how it has been constructed, by doing so you might be able to reduce any issues they may have encountered previously, decrease loading times, and reduce the burden of loading unnecessary pages.
Criteria
- Performance Testing: Regularly measure with each release-cycle (using tooling or through research and auditing) the performance of a website or application to identify and resolve bottlenecks or issues in the underlying code or infrastructure which could ultimately impact the sustainability of a website or application.
- Measurement And Compliance: Only collect the data required to provide a streamlined and effective user-journey, put policies in place to ensure strict adherence, and comply with relevant accessibility policies and privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Impact
Medium
Effort
Low
Benefits
- Environmental:
Alongside the device longevity which inherently comes with having a performant product or service, it can also help you meet the social aspect of ESG targets. - Performance:
Faster pages that load less data improve performance, as there will be less for rendering engines within browsers to process. Additionally, as the pages are smaller, they will reach the visitor quicker based on their connection speed. - Economic:
Less data stored and transferred also reduces costs for those hosting content and those who own websites and applications. - Conversion:
Page load speed can measurably improve conversion rates, as visitors will be less likely to abandon a product or service if the content appears instantaneously.
GRI
- materials: Medium
- energy: Medium
- water: Medium
- emissions: Medium
Example
- Code:
<link rel="prefetch" href="/articles/" as="document">
- Prefetch resources to speed up future navigations.
Resources
- Addy Osmani’s 18-Point Web Performance Checklist
- Awesome Page Speed Metrics
- Browser Rendering Optimization
- Fast load times
- Front-End Performance Checklist 2021
- Getting started with Web Performance
- High Performance Browser Networking
- How UX design can help tackle climate change
- Is GDPR Good for the Environment?
- Learn Performance
- Measuring Web Performance in 2024: The Definitive Guide
- PageSpeed Insights
- The Almost-Complete Guide to Cumulative Layout Shift
- The Performance Inequality Gap
- WebPageTest
- What Are Core Web Vitals (CWVs) & How To Improve Them
- Why does speed matter?
- Why your website should be under 14kB in size