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The "Web Business Objectives" Lesson is part of the full, Web Performance Fundamentals course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Todd explains the first step for improving web performance is understanding the business objectives. Comparing the performance of competitor websites helps understand how much improvement is needed.

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Transcript from the "Web Business Objectives" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> We're going to move on to part two, which is all about how do we go about improving these metrics now that we understand generally what they are. We're going to talk first about the business objectives of building websites, which is the thing that really drives all of this.

[00:00:20] None of us are building web applications purely out of the joy of it. Well, some people definitely are. I know a few people who build websites for art. But most of us here today, I think are building websites because it's our job. And it's our job because somebody is making money off of them.

[00:00:37] So we should talk about how performance influences money, because ultimately that is gonna be the driver of why we do any of this. Then we're gonna go through each of those four web vitals we talked about. And discuss techniques and apply some techniques to improve each one, when you would do it and what to consider.

[00:00:59] And throughout all of that, we're gonna be doing some code demos. We're going to be doing some coding together and we're gonna be doing some exercises. We're done with the spreadsheet worksheet from part one, but we're gonna be using some other stuff this time. All right, let's get into it.

[00:01:18] Let's talk about the objectives of a web business. So if your company, if your organization has a website or a web application, it's usually for one of four reasons. To build awareness for what you do and what your products are, to retain customers to keep them around so that they keep paying you.

[00:01:41] To convert new customers you're trying to attract a group of people and get them to check out from your store or subscribe to your service or watch your training or whatever that is. Are you and through all of those, you might be just trying to compete with other people.

[00:01:59] And there's other players in the market and you want to have a better website than theirs. And that's great. All of these are really important for us to think about in terms of performance, because this is where the money comes from. This is where the money comes from the drives all of our time and our money and our efforts.

[00:02:18] There's an interesting thing to consider, specifically when we talk about competition. So if we're building a website, and we want to compete with other people who might be doing similar things to us. Well, being faster is cool, and something to brag about. But being faster really only matters, is really only detectable by a person If it's at least 20% faster.

[00:02:45] As then, if you're just fractions, like ten milliseconds faster than your competitor and you claim to be faster, well, nobody cares, nobody's gonna notice that. That you have to be at least 20% faster than your competitor for people to matter. And so what does that look like? Well, I changed some things and can check some things out.

[00:03:08] This is a little app called lightestapp.com which allows you to run synthetic chrome lighthouse reports for multiple websites and compare them. So I compared myself with some competitors to see how we did. At the top is my website at requestmetrics.com, and then three other performance related companies speedcurve, calibre, and pingdom.

[00:03:33] And I recorded where the largest contentful paint happens for each of them. Well, I circled each one. This is the point at which the majority of the content has now rendered on the screen. Our website, thankfully, was the fastest at 0.6 seconds. The next fastest was speedcurve which load at 0.9 seconds, which is 50% slower.

[00:04:00] So more than 20% people will notice that we're faster than speedcurve. Calibre was 1.2 seconds which is double, were twice as fast as calibre. And pingdom was 1.5 seconds, so we're 150% faster or they're 150% slower than we are. So if I wanted to come in and compete and say we're the fastest performance monitoring app.

[00:04:29] Well, people would actually notice that, that would be something that we could say and prove.