Intro to Performance

What is website performance?

Website Performance is a measurement of website load speed and time it takes for web browsers to display your site to allow users to interact with web pages.

Website performance refers to:

• How quickly website content loads and renders in the browser
• How well website content responds to user interactions while being loaded
• Uptime of your website and web pages
• How well website functions and fulfill tasks and actions users make
• How well website operates on different browsers and devices
• How reliable and scalable your website is
• How secure your website is

This makes it safe to assume that website performance is a crucial part of web accessibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and conversion rate optimization (CRO). 

This article will have 25+ links to different articles that will be focusing in depth on improving Webflow website performance. Think of this article as an intro to web performance and be sure to click on interesting topics we will be referring to, as well as come back here whenever you need to find any web performance subject.

Let’s dive in!

Is Website Performance a Ranking Factor for SEO?

Website performance is a ranking signal, but it should not be the top priority as there are much more important ranking factors that supersedes it.

Extremely slow and lower performance sites can rank as well. After all it's much more likely that small sites will have easier time to staying fast, while huge websites with loads of value can't compete with them in speed as they have so much technical/size dept.

So in reality page speed and other factors should be lower on your SEO-to-do list, while still being fixation of quality web developers.

That's because: slow websites with great content and loads of backlinks can rank fine, but fast websites without great content and low domain authority will never rank. 

Meaning, arguably there are much more valuable SEO needs than your page speed/performance that all successful websites must accomplish first. 

That being said, we have to understand the real answer to “is website performance important for SEO?”.

Website performance is important for reasons that are bigger than SEO:

• SSL is mandatory practice in Web so browsers trust you
• Page loading speed can improve conversion rates on your website
• Today, fast loading websites are expected by every user visiting your site
• Fast load times and mobile friendly designs instill trust from visitors - nobody trusts a site that “doesn’t look right on mobile”, or "look like from the 90s", etc.

I could continue, but the message is simple.

SEO is a way to ensure traffic is coming to your website. Once that traffic starts flowing, website performance makes it easier for that traffic to “use your website”. If visitors have performance issues while using your website, your rankings will drop - that's because search engines will pick up on the fact that "users don't like this page/website" and will gradually serve it on SERPs less and less.

As long as performance issues are unbearable for the user - this can have negative impact on other SEO efforts.

So in a way, low performing websites will send signals to search engines that users don’t get answers or can’t use your website. This will result in less traffic as search engines operate based on trust in your website - whether that's bad content quality, not matching search intent or performance related issues can be hard to determine. 

Low performance = low user trust = low search engine trust = less traffic.

So that concludes, the "is website performance a top priority for SEO" part. It isn't, but it helps.

Webflow Web Performance: Basics

Just because Webflow is a visual website editor does not mean that it doesn’t use the same website development principles like any website on the planet. Before we dig into performance, we have to understand what parts (code) is there on your Webflow website.

Building any website requires HTML, CSS and JS. 

Let us try to explain what core website programming languages are - in the most simple manner we can…

Keep in mind, this will be an oversimplification that is helpful for beginners starting out with web development and design.

HTML is how your website content is structured. Think of simple document headings and paragraphs.

CSS is how your website content is presented. Think of colors, fonts and text sizes in your document.

JavaScript (JS) is how your content behaves. Think animations, movements and logic.

Main Website Performance Metric: Page Speed

Page speed is one of the main website performance metrics that gets most attention from web developers and website owners. Use links to our articles on different page speed subtopics within this article to learn more about different aspects of page speed performance, but before that… Let’s establish a few main website speed performance concepts. 

What is Perceived Website Performance?

Perceived website performance is the subjective measurement of speed, performance, reliability and website responsiveness. It’s a metric of how users will “feel” about the speed, as opposed to “what the speed actually is”. Believe it or not, how a user feels can be arguably much more important than how fast the website actually performs.

To understand why perceived speed is important, here’s a simple example:

Imagine you load a website and you stare at a white page for a few seconds, then the website and all the content with all the visual elements suddenly appear. 

Now imagine, loading the same website, but instead of a few seconds with no content, you would get a loader spinning or a logo animation distracting you from the fact that it will take a few seconds for the page to load.

Optimizing websites for perceived performance aims to create more pleasurable waiting experiences for users while their content is being fetched and rendered.

Testing Website Performance

Two most common ways to test your Webflow website performance is to use Lighthouse testing or Google PageSpeed Insights. 

Fundamentally it’s the same test/tool but one is accessed directly on Chrome browsers by going to the page you want to test, pressing F12 and running a Lighthouse test to see Performance, Accessibility, SEO and Best Practice scores… While the other is done by visiting https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and adding page URL and running the test.