The State of Performance in the WordPress Ecosystem
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This document summarizes performance metrics for WordPress websites from the HTTP Archive and Chrome UX Report. Key findings include: the median page weight for WordPress sites is 1.9 MB with significant growth in CSS and image weights; first contentful paint, DOM content loaded, and onload times skew slower for WordPress sites compared to averages; and monitoring performance metrics can help the WordPress ecosystem improve performance over time through best practices, case studies, and incentives for developers.
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The State of Performance in the WordPress Ecosystem
- 1. The State of Performance In the WordPress Ecosystem Rick Viscomi rviscomi@google.com
- 2. 2 Oh, hello ● Developer Programs Engineer ● Web transparency advocate ● Made YouTube fast ™ ● Cowrote “Using WebPageTest” Rick Viscomi rviscomi@google.com
- 3. 3“The Performance Golden Rule” by Steve Souders, 2012 80%of the end-user response time is spent on the front end
- 4. 4 Why does web performance matter?
- 5. 5wpostats.comWPO Stats: Case studies correlating performance and conversions
- 6. 6wpostats.comWPO Stats: Case studies correlating performance and conversions “Rebuilding Pinterest pages for performance resulted in a 40% decrease in wait time, a 15% increase in SEO traffic and a 15% increase in conversion rate to signup.”
- 7. 7bit.ly/2tKmMnIThink with Google: Revenue Impact Calculator
- 8. 8bit.ly/2Dt5PlzGoogle Webmaster Central Blog "Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches."
- 9. 9bit.ly/2HjmjdUMalte Ubl, TL of AMP "Objective metrics collected through public data sets like the Chrome User Experience Report can provide for objective performance and UX data independent of technology."
- 10. 10Source: “The New Bar for Web Experiences” at Chrome Dev Summit 2017 60%of mobile connections worldwide are 2G
- 12. 12Source: DoubleClick - The need for mobile speed, September 2016 53%of users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load
- 14. 14Source: https://httparchive.org/reports/chrome-ux-report?start=2018_04_01 35% desktop > 3s 52% mobile > 3s
- 15. 15 How do we measure performance? Lab vs Field Personal vs Public
- 16. 16 Lab Field Mine Ours WebPageTest RUM Analytics Chrome UX ReportHTTP Archive
- 17. 17 Lab Analyzes how a website is built ● is it built on WordPress? ● how many bytes does it load? ● does it use a CDN? ● are images optimized?
- 18. 18 Field Represents real user experiences ● desktop or mobile? ● wifi or 3G? ● fast or slow page load? ● which pages were viewed?
- 19. 19 Personal Tools that tell us about particular websites ● Chrome Developer Tools ● WebPageTest ● Google Analytics
- 20. 20 Personal + Lab: WebPageTest
- 21. 21 Personal + Lab: WebPageTest
- 22. 22 Personal + Lab: WebPageTest
- 23. 23 Personal + Lab: WebPageTest
- 24. 24 Personal + Field: Google Analytics
- 25. 25 Personal + Field: Google Analytics
- 26. 26 Public Tools that tell us about the state of the web ● HTTP Archive ● Chrome UX Report
- 27. 27 Public + Lab: HTTP Archive
- 28. 28 Public + Lab: HTTP Archive
- 29. 29 500K GCS BQ Biweekly 134 Public + Lab: HTTP Archive
- 30. 30 Public + Field: Chrome UX Report
- 31. 31 Public + Field: Chrome UX Report Aggregate ● Form factor ● Effective connection type ● Geography ● UX performance Analyze ● Raw data on BigQuery ● URL resolution on PageSpeed Insights ● Mobile Speed Scorecard ● Third party integrations Anonymize ● Publicly indexable ● Origin rollup ● Unique user threshold ● Normalized to 100%
- 32. 32 Public + Field: Chrome UX Report First Paint First Contentful Paint DOM Content Loaded Onload
- 33. 33 How does WordPress perform? in HTTP Archive
- 34. 34
- 35. 35 WordPress sites detected as of April 15, 2018 199,022
- 36. 36 Median Page Weight 1921.8 KB ▲ 190.8 KB 👉 lots more stuff to load
- 37. 37 Median Page Weight Growth since January 2016 +19.1% ▼ 0.4 pp 👉 slightly slower growth
- 38. 38 Median CSS Weight 69.3 KB ▲ 16.3 KB 👉 much more CSS
- 39. 39 Median CSS Weight Growth since January 2016 +60.0% ▲ 29.5 pp 👉 growing twice as fast
- 40. 40 Median JavaScript Requests 24 ▲ 4 👉 slightly more requests
- 41. 41 Median JavaScript Weight 397.5 KB ▲ 26.8 KB 👉 heavier scripts
- 42. 42 Median JavaScript Weight Growth since January 2016 +22.5% ▼ 4.8 pp 👉 not growing as quickly (always been heavy)
- 43. 43 Median Gzip Savings 4.5 KB ▼ 0.4 KB 👉 not taking full advantage of gzip compression
- 44. 44 Median Gzip Savings Improvement since January 2016 79.5% ▲ 7.2 pp 👉 more improvement
- 45. 45 Median Image Requests 40 ▲ 1 👉 roughly the same number of images
- 46. 46 Median Image Weight 957.6 KB ▲ 96.3 KB 👉 much heavier images
- 47. 47 Median Image Weight Growth since January 2016 +15.6% ▼ 1.4 pp 👉 not growing as quickly (always been heavy)
- 48. 48 Median Image Savings 67.5 KB ▲ 8.4 KB 👉 not taking full advantage of image optimization
- 49. 49 Median Image Savings Improvement since January 2016 49.5% ▲ 26.3 pp 👉 halved savings, double improvement
- 50. 50 Median Video Weight Growth since January 2016 👉 much better than before, but very long tail
- 51. 51 Median Video Weight 2140.6 KB ▼ 282.1 KB 👉 less video
- 52. 52 Median Video Weight Growth since January 2016 +1020.7% ▲ 50.1 pp 👉 explosive, faster growth
- 53. 53 Median Video Weight Growth since January 2016 👉 recent phenomenon, long tail (10 MB)
- 54. 54 How does WordPress perform? in the Chrome UX Report
- 55. 55 WordPress sites detected as of January 1, 2018 785,733
- 56. 56 Average First Contentful Paint Time 👉 FCP skews slower
- 57. 57 Average DOM Content Loaded Time 👉 DCL skews slower
- 58. 58 Average Onload Time 👉 OL skews slower
- 59. 59 How do we perform?
- 64. 64 Onload
- 65. 65 First Contentful Paint and Page Weight
- 66. 66 First Contentful Paint and Page Weight
- 67. 67 First Contentful Paint and JavaScript Weight
- 68. 68 First Contentful Paint and Image Weight
- 69. 69 559 VIP websites managed by attendees
- 70. 70 216 VIP websites in CrUX
- 71. 71 Average First Contentful Paint
- 72. 72 First Contentful Paint per Site
- 73. 73 Fast First Contentful Paint and Page Weight
- 74. 74 How do we move the ecosytem forward?
- 75. 75 Monitor performance ● track improvements ● flag regressions
- 76. 76 Celebrate performance ● culture of performance ● publish case studies
- 77. 77 Reward performance ● praise in public ● incentivize developers
- 78. 78 Work with developers ● document best practices ● performance hackathon
- 79. 79 Performance is just one part of the UX picture. Accessibility Security Discoverability Design Interactivity Localization ...and many more
- 80. 80 Thanks! Rick Viscomi rviscomi@google.com ● HTTP Archive httparchive.org ● Chrome UX Report bit.ly/chrome-ux-report ● WebPageTest webpagetest.org ● Revenue Impact Calculator thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/mobile/ ● These slides bit.ly/wp-vip-perf
Editor's Notes
- “web researcher” “data scientist”
- this talk is brought to you by the number 80 Let’s start with a statistic known as the “Golen Rule” of web performance 80% of load time is on the front end after the HTML page has loaded JS load/parse/execute, image loading, CSS loading/painting, ads loading if a site loads in 5 seconds, only 1 second is spent on the backend coined by Steve Souders in 2012 “godfather” of the field of web performance optimization BEFORE client side rendering became popular
- why does it matter that a page loads in 5 seconds? what’s the different if it loads in 5 vs 10 seconds? kinsie’s talk: analog vs digital user experience of consuming news content imagine if a newspaper “loaded” similar to a web page: flash of unstyle text, image is last to load, ads pop in and reflow the layout, etc why do we tolerate that kind of experience on the web?
- Performance is correlated with business metrics (revenue, conversions)
- Many case studies from notable companies Causal relationship or at least correlation between performance and business metrics
- There is a real dollar value to performance Using trends from Google Analytics Apply a function to estimate difference in revenue Given some hypothetical speedup Every site is different, just an estimate Generally, faster = better conversions RUN YOUR OWN A/B TESTS! PUBLISH YOUR FINDINGS! (wpostats.com)
- Fast performing mobile sites will rank higher, all else being equal
- News carousels won’t be limited to AMP pages for long will include objectively fast sites
- our users are at a disadvantage their connection to the web is slow
- it doesn’t help that web pages are heavy and only getting heavier how long to load 1560 KB on 2G? 1560 KB / 70 Kbps = 3 minutes check my math mobile pages aren’t much lighter than desktop growing much faster than desktop if anything, mobile is where page weight matters most paid data plans emerging markets
- users hate slow performance no chance for them to sign up for your service, see your ads, or read your content if they’ve already left your site
- there is a very long tail of slow performance that users experience
- 35% of desktop onloads and 52% of mobile onloads are slower than 3 seconds
- performance matters so how do we measure it?
- each tool answers the following questions differently: what is being measured? how big is the dataset?
- great for understanding how the page was built (one page at a time) not so great for understanding how users actually experience it (by design)
- the “inexcusible” performance must-haves
- cold page load (no cache) a good upper limit for bytes and requests fast network time not very reliable highly dependent on user’s demographics and app state
- what was requested when was it requested how long did it take: dns, tcp, ssl, server response, network response in what order? did it block other requests?
- great for understanding how users experience the site as whole RUM doesn’t really care about how the pages are built - it just measures the users’ experience
- great for understanding how users experience the site as whole RUM doesn’t really care about how the pages are built - it just measures the users’ experience
- in order to understand the ecosystem, we need tools that scale up to hundreds of thousands or millions of samples
- the chart we saw earlier of the median page weight is from HTTP Archive public website of high-level stats and trends about the web
- people use it for all kinds of things sobering observations about the state of the web academic research standardization support
- the data of the median page load time is from the Chrome UX Report collection of real user performance data around the world
- first we have to identify which sites are built with WordPress we’ve recently started using Wappalyer to tell us not just about WordPress, but over 1000 other web technologies
- 43% of 462K higher than the anecdotal “30% of the web” stat biased towards the head 500K? possibly also some false positives (implied detections in Wappalyzer)
- compare WordPress sites’ stats against the global stats page weight is the total number of bytes loaded on the page median page weight for WordPress is 1921.8 KB it’s 190.8 KB bigger than the median web page WordPress sites load a lot more stuff
- we can see the how this stat has changed since we were first able to detect WordPress in 2016 WordPress sites have grown by 19.1% the growth is slightly slower compared to everyone
- we can drill down to the page weight for specific resource types, like CSS
- unnecessary bytes sent over the network at the median, it’s better than the web as a whole
- ~27% of 2.9M
- https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/savedquery/920398604589:3eb540c201c442139b42301a845f19e5 The Event Studio Alley Interactive Dekode Inpsyde Reaktiv Studios Trew Knowledge Inc. Ndevr, Inc YIKES, Inc. Rinat Khaziev
- Companies manage many more websites than just those for their corporate home pages
- Compared to other known WP sites, the density of fast FCP is about the same But attendee’s VIP sites have much fewer “slow” FCP experiences
- A few very high performers Most VIPs are in the “average” range (1-3 seconds)
- There are three trends that become visible (the longer you stare at it) the pages with the smallest density of fast FCP are the heaviest the pages with the biggest density of fast FCP are the lightest everything in between generally has a lot of stuff this makes sense median wordpress page loads more stuff than the median page average wordpress performance is worse than average performance
- we can’t improve what we don’t measure i will dedicate my time to ensure that we have the resources to measure performance and our efforts to improve it individual site owners like you need to monitor your own performance
- incorporate it into your culture make a habit of asking “ok but how fast is it?” celebrate success studies publish case studies of perf improving conversions, etc
- praise in public