AI-generated Key Takeaways
-
Web application performance, encompassing speed and responsiveness, is crucial for user satisfaction and achieving business goals, as slow performance leads to high bounce rates and low conversions.
-
Content-driven applications across various industries, including news, ecommerce, and documentation, require fast loading times for optimal user experience.
-
Tools like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse can help assess and improve web application performance by providing detailed analysis and suggestions.
-
Core Web Vitals, including Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift, are key metrics for measuring and optimizing loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.
Performance refers to your web application's efficiency, speed, and responsiveness. Slow load times and inactivity lead to high bounce rates and few conversions. Therefore, content-driven application development must prioritize performance to make sure that users can interact with the application smoothly and efficiently. A web application's speed and responsiveness are valued across industries; news applications are expected to provide articles as fast as possible, ecommerce applications must load products quickly to keep potential customers interested, and documentation or blogs demand quick loading for clear navigation and reader satisfaction.
Tools for assessing the performance of content-driven applications include:
- PageSpeed Insights (PSI): Run by web.dev is a tool to check the experience of mobile and desktop and provide suggestions on what to improve. This is powered by the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) dataset and checks for multiple types of experiences.
- Lighthouse: Can be found in Google Chrome Developer Tools and has a browser extension to measure many aspects of the web application such as performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO and PWA audits.
The Core Web Vitals tool includes the following aspects, among others:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. Pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. Pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.