Site Performance Budget
Dan Mall knows that users are not in the habit of sticking around while a site takes nine seconds to load—and even nine seconds is a stretch. There are a few culprits behind heavy pages, like typography, code, and images that haven’t been optimized. If we develop a performance budget, and test our page load times, we can identify the fat that needs to be trimmed and improve load times. We can also use a performance budget to make content and feature decisions, such as how many images we use on a page.
Create a spreadsheet and run your website through a free webpage test tool. Note your page times for start render, visually complete, and fully loaded. Now list your competitors and compare their times against yours. Tools such as webpagetest.org will generate a report that can help you make the decisions you need to improve your site’s performance.