In the digital age, website performance for ecommerce websites is not just a luxury but a necessity. It plays a pivotal role in user experience, conversion rates, and even Google rankings. A website's performance is a key factor in Google's search algorithms, and a site that loads quickly and smoothly can significantly improve its position in search results.
With platforms such as Magento and Adobe Commerce being historically quite difficult to achieve good performance (unless using Hyva or Breeze), keeping performance high once you've achieved it is of paramount importance. Otherwise, all your hard work goes to waste!
As an agency, it is especially important to monitor the performance of client websites. After all, changes made to the website can impact front-end performance, sometimes seriously. Of course, not all of those changes come from deployments that your agency makes.
In can also be the case that the client themselves can negatively impact performance - perhaps by uploading unoptimised images, or by adding some new Javascript to their Google Tag Manager container - all of which can quickly erode the performance gains that your agency has made.
On Tap's AuditIQ service gives agencies the ability to track the performance of their clients' websites every day, detecting changes and where these become trends, it proactively alerts your team about the issue.
AuditIQ uses Google Lighthouse to automate these checks, and agencies can scan many different pages on a client's website in order to separately track the home page, category pages, different types of product pages, etc.
The tool also provides 30 days of historical reporting of all the metrics it collects for each of the pages tracked - and it tracks more than just performance because it measures accessibility, best practice and SEO and more. All of the checks are done daily automatically, so your team can concentrate on the day-to-day business whilst having the peace of mind that issues are being looked for and notified about if they are found.
As an agency, getting an early notification of performance issues is vital in managing customer expectations. It enables you to be proactive about reporting and fixing issues, rather than receiving a support ticket from your client at some point in the future saying, "Why is my website so slow?". The opportunity for greater client engagement is enhanced significantly by using AuditIQ.
Daily scanning using tools like AuditIQ can highlight a range of front-end performance issues. These can include slow loading times, unoptimized images, render-blocking resources, and more. Once these issues are identified, developers can take steps to address them. This might involve optimising images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, implementing lazy loading, or other performance-enhancing techniques.
In conclusion, maintaining optimal website performance is crucial in today's digital landscape. Tools like Google Lighthouse, combined with practices like daily scanning, can help developers keep their websites running smoothly and efficiently. By identifying and addressing performance issues proactively, businesses can provide a better user experience, improve their Google rankings, and, ultimately, drive more traffic and conversions. So as a digital agency, scanning should be a key part of your client website maintenance strategy.
