In the span of 2 years, I increased awareness of web performance from 0 to a top-of-mind trait that receives company-wide attention and is a point of emphasis from the C-level executives.
This is ongoing work that is technical and investigative but is also cultural. In addition to fixing the technical issues, I produced documentation, consulted with vendors to fix issues with 3rd parties, and produced materials to assist the business in choosing vendors who can meet a reasonable amount of performance criteria.
Why was it built?
During 2020, I found myself with an unexpected amount of free time due to the pandemic. I threw myself into the web performance world headfirst, and I realized that there was an opportunity for Taunton in this area. The timeline also coincided with the release of Core Web Vitals.
You can hear more about my journey on the Catching Up with Web Performance podcast.
Business impact
Performance has impacted a number of business metrics. For example, after optimizing for Largest Contentful Paint, there was a 9% improvement in bounce rate, or that session engagement increases by 8% for every 0.25 reduction in the median First Contentful Paint time for the user's session.