Our MD James was asked to speak at the NCC Group's Performance Matters event at King's Place in London on Thursday 11th May. James' talk was called real-world web performance problems, and he was interviewed by the NCC Group's Performance Consultant Simon about the ongoing work that we've been doing on improving the performance of COOK's website.
Throughout the last few months we have been making a variety of changes to the COOK website to improve it's general performance. We started off with quick wins such as removing old disused fonts being loaded onto the site and optimising images, as well as swtiching off some third party resources that were not always needed, and loading those that were needed asyncronously. We have also taken on larger refactoring projects, including one where we rewrote the code for the product pages to make them more up to date. The reworking of the product pages alone resulted in the average page load time improving from 4.8 seconds to 3.4 seconds, which in turn saw the conversion rate increase by 7%.
James' talk demonstrated how faster websites not only provide a better user experience, they can also be proven to increase revenue over time. After the talk, James also took part in a Q&A session with the audience, where a number of topics were discussed including how performance impacts SEO, and how we used data from NCC's Real User Monitoring tool to identify which areas of the website to prioritise for performance improvements.
NCC's Performance Matters was a brilliant event, with lots of interesting talks throughout the day, which gave Redspa's team some great ideas that we can use in future projects, as well as an insight into performance issues faced by a number of different industries, and how teams work together in order to fix them.
