Not a great statistic, but are bad digital experiences really that costly? A bad digital experience is when a website is slow, unreliable, and/or insecure. Is it slow to load, are there errors affecting our SEO, is a third party broken, or is payment data being stolen right from their device? These issues are all reputation damaging, more so than ever in an increasingly socially connected world.
There are of course badly structured, defect-ridden and terribly designed websites created every day but the issues here get discovered in the build and testing phase before going live. When you get a website live and servicing customers, there is still so much more to do, you enter a new phase, the active monitoring, and continuous improvements phase.
Your website is a living and breathing portal into your organisation. It is your shop window, your salesperson, and your checkout, so it needs to be right. Imagine if your shop window is dirty, your door creaks, your salesperson is slow or your checkout fails to connect half the time, that would affect how many customers buy from you and it is no different online. You need to understand all aspects of your user journey to ensure you have a world-class experience to increase your online revenues.
For this, web performance is vital. It is not a nice thing to have, it is not something we should get to, it is vital to the online success of your company and in today’s market, the success of your company full stop. Whether it is on a desktop or on a mobile device, customers (and you and I are two of them) are fickle creatures who know the sort of performance experience they deserve and do not tolerate anything less.
Web Performance Stats:
Web performance is extremely vital for ecommerce companies. Whether your product is a shoe, a bag, a holiday, a concert ticket, or a bet on the football, if you browse for something you want, add it to a basket, and then pay for it, you have a user journey that people expect to be fast, reliable, and safe. No if’s, no but’s.
Not only is your customer fickle, but so is the world’s greatest search engine, Google. Soon they will release their ‘Badge of Shame’, and every site will get much higher bounce rates as consumers will take this advice literally. Every online team needs to stay ahead of the curve and monitor their site 24/7 to ensure they do not lose out.
Therefore RapidSpike has created our new ‘Performance’ feature. We are using a serverless global network to deliver the key ‘Web Vitals’ to ensure you are not only aware of your speed, but you measure, monitor and improve it.
We have combined an upgrade of Google Lighthouse v7 and Web Vitals, alongside our proprietary technology that grabs every detail on your website or page to deliver a whole plethora of information, organised to help you improve your web performance.
You can run on desktop and mobile from over 24 regions across the world with more being added. You can run every up to 5 minutes to build a true picture of your 24/7 platform performance, and you can run it 100 times more often than any of our main competitors and keep the richness of your data, every HAR downloaded, every error tracked and compare every test day by day, release by release.
It is also a totally clean run. If you run web vitals or Google lighthouse from your own machine it’s a good benchmark but it is impacted by add-ons, machine speed, network and more which impacts the true performance picture. You need to have a measurable, known benchmark to improve your performance, a clean environment that runs multiple times a day, every day, so you know for sure the changes you have spent time and money making are truly working or get a budget approved to work on the issues.
Web performance is vital as it also degrades over time. This is especially true if you are reliant on 3rd parties, new content added or your marketing team loves adding new personalisation tools to help with your digital experience. If these changes are not tracked you can lose important ground on web performance which negatively affects your digital experience.
Every minute of uptime, every one percent performance improvement and every cyber-attack stopped is going to help you win against your competitors, so getting ahead with continuous improvement on your website performance, reliability and security is not just a must, it is vital. Understanding what makes your site faster, better, and safer is a continuous balancing act which RapidSpike helps companies understand.
