Performance matters — driving business impact with experiences

Exceptional digital experiences across web, mobile, and other applications are key to standing out in today’s digital-first world, but knowing how to deliver those experiences can be tricky. Sleek design and fresh content are just one part of the equation. The experiences also need to be high performing to truly be exceptional, which means they must be fast, optimized, and personalized.

In this challenging landscape with an abundance of options, boosting performance of your experiences is essential to winning customers. Let’s dive deeper into performance and its impact on user experience and business results.

What is performance?

Performance may mean something different for different organizations and can be tracked in multiple ways depending on your business and goals. In general, it refers to the speed, responsiveness, and overall user experience of a website or application, as well as how an experience is performing in terms of user engagement, conversion rates, or other metrics. Here are a few of its key components:

• Overall load time. This is the amount of time it takes to download and display experiences. Slow loading times result in frustration and poor user experience. Factors that impact load time include hosting server, size of files, and number of HTTP requests.
• Interactivity. Ensuring that experiences are smooth and seamless is also important to the overall user experience. Users want to be able to easily interact with experiences, from scrolling pages to clicking buttons.
• Experimentation. Testing different content, design, layout, and other variables to identify the highest performing experiences will ultimately improve the user experience and overall performance.

Why performance matters

A great experience can be the difference between a conversion or a bounce, ultimately impacting your bottom line. Getting your experiences out there isn’t enough — you also want to make sure that those experiences are performing well.

Poor-performing experiences that are slow to load, difficult to navigate, or generic can drive visitors away. High-performing experiences, on the other hand, that are blazing fast, responsive, and optimized can create loyal customers. Here are three major reasons optimizing for performance is crucial to your business:

1. Bounce rates

Even if you’ve designed exceptional experiences with quality content for your visitors, it won’t matter if your experience is clunky and slow. This could lead to frustration and a quick exit. Studies show that:

• 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
• A 2-second delay in page load time increases bounce rate by over 100%.
• A 1-second improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) can result in a 14% decrease in bounce rate.

You should also make sure that the experience you are delivering is relevant, personalized, and engaging, so that your visitors stay to interact and connect with your brand. According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t find it.

If visitors bounce because of a poor experience, you lose the opportunity to attract, engage, and convert them.

2. Conversion

A common purpose of experiences is to generate traffic and drive conversion, whether that’s making a purchase, completing a form, getting a quote, or downloading a guide.

Web and application performance can have a significant impact on conversion rates and your bottom line. Studies show that conversions can fall by 20% for every one-second delay in mobile page load, and a 0.1 second improvement in performance increases conversion rates by over 8% for retail sites.

Key to optimizing conversion is performance, which includes reducing page load times, enhancing the size and delivery of page resources, and testing variations to identify the best performing experiences. Fast, high-performing experiences encourage visitors to stay, engage, and ultimately convert.

3. SEO

Performance impacts your SEO ranking, which is a key component to visibility. Search engines like Google prioritize websites that provide a good user experience, including fast load times, accessibility, and easy navigation.

A higher search engine ranking boosts your visibility, driving more traffic and opportunities to attract and convert customers. Conversely, a low search engine ranking makes it more difficult for customers to find and visit your site. Improving performance helps you optimize for traffic and uncover opportunities to attract new customers.

How to measure performance

Performance optimization is crucial to improve user experience, traffic, SEO ranking, and conversion. To understand how to improve, it is helpful to measure and assess your current performance.

One of the many tools available to help you measure performance is PageSpeed Insights, which is a popular free tool provided by Google.

It evaluates performance based on various key metrics, including loading speed, responsiveness, and stability. Based on this analysis, it provides a detailed report of those metrics and an aggregate score (called a Lighthouse score) ranging from 0 to 100. The tool also provides helpful suggestions on opportunities to further optimize.

Learn how to optimize the performance of your experiences

To deliver exceptional experiences that win customers, you need to ensure they have fast loading times, they’re easy to interact with, and they deliver personalized content. Optimizing for performance can have a significant impact on user experience, traffic, search engine rankings, and conversions, making it a worthwhile investment to drive business success.

Check out these sessions and hands-on lab at Adobe Summit, coming up March 21–23, 2023. Summit is available both in-person and virtually to help you discover best practices and built-in tools from Adobe Experience Manager to boost performance:

• Performance Matters: Speed Up Your Site & Win More Customers: Learn why performance matters and how to optimize your experiences.
• Ready, Set, Done! Create the World’s Fastest Site in Minutes: Discover how new capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager Sites empower brands to easily deliver high-performing experiences.
• Rapidly Deliver High-Impact Experiences with Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Build and launch the fastest pages through hands-on learning using new capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager Sites.

Pauline Huynh is a product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager Sites, leading the go-to-market strategy for growth and employee experiences. Prior to joining Adobe, she worked at Deloitte as a consultant, helping technology clients transform business operations. Pauline holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BSBA from Georgetown University. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding, learning pottery, and exploring new restaurants in San Francisco.