What happened to caring about website performance?

Do people creating websites not care about website performance or do they not really know about it? I can not remember this not ever being a concern for me, since starting web development over 17 years ago. Yes, things have changed over the years like faster bandwidth, improvement in cell phones, but so has individuals attention span.

In the early days bandwidth was a big bottle neck to be of concern with your site performance. Then smartphones came on the market and again the concern about data usage along with bandwidth came into the equation along with other concerns like getting your website to look good on a small screen again. That also has a factor into site performance too. We also are fighting with short attention spans and people not liking to wait for a page to load. The quicker you can get something to display for the user the better.

One reason you should care about website performance is because Google cares about it. They have tools for testing it. One is their PageSpeed Insights where you enter the url you want to analyze and it scores your website performance for mobile and desktop and makes suggestions on how to improve it. Another tool Google has built into the Chrome web browser is called lighthouse. Lighthouse only looks at mobile performance, but it scores accessibility, best practices, and SEO along with suggestions for improving them too. You also can get a score for a Progressive Web App if that is what your site is. I don’t think Google would take time to create and maintain these tools if they did not care about website performance.

Your performance is going to take a hit when using 3rd party platforms for your website like WordPress, Wix, Drupal ,or other CMS platforms. These make building websites easier and faster, but they come at a cost at reducing your performance. If you are going to use these platforms then you’ll want to make sure you are doing everything you can control to get the best performance you can out of them.

There are many factors that need to be considered when building a website with performance in mind. I’m not going to get into them, but what is under the hood is one that should really be evaluated carefully. Start paying attention to performance with designing and building websites.