How does the ONE app affect my Page Speed?

Introduction

Long story short, the ONE app does NOT slow down your website (even if the score on a pagespeed analyzer is showing a lower score)

In this article, we will explore how the ONE platform has been designed with a focus on minimizing negative impacts on your website's page speed and search engine optimization (SEO). We will also discuss the limitations of automated page speed analyzers and why their scores should not be treated as the ultimate objective. Lastly, we'll delve into the details and optimizations we have implemented to ensure that our app scales seamlessly, while keeping your site fast and responsive!

What is Pagespeed and why does it matter?

In e-commerce, pagespeed plays a critical role in the success of your online business. Faster page speeds have a direct impact on improving conversion rates and customer satisfaction, see why:

Improved User Experience: When a potential customer visits your website, their initial impression is formed within seconds. If your pages take too long to load, visitors are more likely to become frustrated and abandon their shopping journey. By optimizing pagespeed, you provide a seamless and delightful user experience, increasing the chances of engagement, interaction, and ultimately, conversions.

Reduced Bounce Rates: Slow-loading pages contribute to high bounce rates, meaning visitors leave your site without exploring further. This not only hampers conversions but also negatively impacts your search engine rankings. Search engines like Google consider bounce rates as a metric for user engagement and relevancy, so optimizing pagespeed helps you retain visitors and signal to search engines that your website provides valuable content.

Search Engine Visibility: Page speed is a significant factor in search engine rankings. Search engines, such as Google, prioritize websites that offer fast-loading pages to provide a better user experience. By optimizing your website for speed, you increase the chances of ranking higher in search results, driving more organic traffic and potential customers to your e-commerce store.

How the ONE app ensures page speed is minimally impacted

At ONE, we have implemented a range of features and optimizations to ensure optimal performance without compromising speed, SEO, or user experience. Here's how:

Lightweight and Asynchronous Loading: Our app is designed to be super lightweight, with an initial page load size of less than 15kb (a VERY small initial load, typically milliseconds). This small footprint minimizes the impact on page load times. Furthermore, the app loads additional resources asynchronously in the background, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted browsing experience for your visitors.

Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Browser Caching: We leverage an enterprise-grade CDN and browser caching to further optimize load speed. By distributing content across multiple servers geographically, we reduce latency and improve delivery times. Browser caching also allows for efficient caching of static assets, resulting in faster subsequent page loads.

Code Splitting: To maximize efficiency, our app utilizes code splitting. This means that only the necessary plugins and features for a particular campaign are loaded when it is active. When a campaign is inactive, no additional resources are loaded, reducing unnecessary overhead and improving overall page performance.

Reliability with AWS and Cloudflare: Our app runs on the robust infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare. This ensures exceptional uptime and reliability, with a promised 99.99% availability. By leveraging these industry-leading technologies, we guarantee that our platform is always accessible and responsive.

Why Automated Page Analyzers Don't Tell the Full Story

Automated page analyzers have become popular tools for evaluating page speed. However, it is essential to note that these analyzers may not always provide accurate assessments. You may notice after installing the ONE app on your website, that your score may drop. This is not a cause for concern. Here are some reasons why they can be inaccurate:

Limited Testing Scenarios: Automated page analyzers evaluate your website based on predefined test scenarios, which may not encompass the full range of real-world user interactions and browsing conditions. As a result, the scores provided may not reflect the actual performance experienced by your visitors.

Dynamic Content and Personalization: Many websites today incorporate dynamic content and personalized elements based on user preferences or behavior. Automated analyzers may struggle to account for such complexities, leading to skewed results.

Third-Party Dependencies: Websites often rely on third-party scripts, plugins, or integrations to provide additional functionality. These external dependencies can impact page speed, but automated analyzers may not accurately measure their influence.

Network Variability: Network conditions vary across different regions and devices, affecting the loading times of various assets. Automated analyzers may not consider these variables, resulting in misleading scores.

In short, using Automated Page Analyzers are a great way to get directionally correct results on how your website is operating, but focusing too much on a particular score oftentimes will cause more harm than good as you are more likely to make negative tradeoffs on the functionality of your website in the pursuit of achieving a higher score.

Still Don't Believe that Page Analyzers are Unreliable?

Let's take a look at some specific case studies!

Let's take a look at Amazon, arguably the largest and most successful e-commerce company around. Surely, with their infinite resources they must have a perfect, or near-perfect score on the page speed analyzers right? When running it through PageSpeed Insights, here's what we see for their performance score.



You can see the full report HERE

Maybe that still doesn't convince you because Amazon's not really known for the "best UI" or they're not really the same thing as a Shopify store. So let's take a look at a brand that IS a big online retailer AND one that uses Shopify. Let's look at Allbirds!



Based on this score, you would think that Allbirds has a horribly slow website! So why aren't they focusing on bringing their performance score up?

And if that STILL doesn't convince you that PageSpeed analyzers should not be used as the ultimate source of truth, let's take a look at Google (specifically their Mobile site). Some would say this is the biggest brand in the world with the simplest website. Let's take a look at their score.



Even with minimal content on their initial landing page, you can see that their mobile score site is not all that high! It's also worth noting that the PageSpeed Insights tool is a service that Google has put out themselves! You can see their full results HERE

All of that to say, that online merchants should DEFINITELY focus on making sure that their website loads quickly for their users. But rather than focusing on an arbitrary score, merchants should focus on the actual user experience itself!

Updated on: 03/08/2023