Web Performance is a niche term in a broad market, should we widen our appeal to reach more people?
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Web performance has been a hot topic in web development and browser engineering since the first public web pages. The first book on the topic, Web Performance Tuning: Speeding Up the Web was published in 1998, with Steve Souders kicking off the Web Performance Optimisation industry when he published his book High Performance Websites nine years later in 2007.
As an industry-within-an-industry we have built resources, adopted hashtags (#WebPerf, #PerfMatters) and created meetups and conferences (LDNWebPerf, #PerfMatters, Performance.now). We’ve focused in on a subset of web development, whilst simultaneously complaining that it’s hard to get business buy-in and wider appreciation of the topic. We’ve even created a site to collect proof that web performance is important to business success! We know that web performance is important, but we consistently struggle to convince the wider world to prioritise speed as a feature.
Something that has long troubled me when discussing web performance with customers (and friends outside the industry) is that the term “web performance” is ambiguous, it means different things to different people. To someone in marketing it might mean the performance of web campaigns, measured in click-through rate and engagements. To ecommerce it might mean the business performance of the website, measured in conversions and revenue. To SEOs it could be the ranking of key pages, and to performance artists it means using the web as a medium for their art!
This ambiguity can work in our favour; it means our messaging lands with lots of different parties within a business: everyone wants to improve web performance! This often leads to confusion in the first meeting, requiring early clarification of what web performance means to us and our tools & services. I find myself describing our version of web performance as “measuring and optimising the speed of a web or mobile application to maximise user experience and business success”.
Web Performance is measuring and optimising the speed of a web or mobile application to maximise user experience and business success
If we are to correctly engage the broadest possible audience with our messaging, we could do better with more targeted language. Should we be using a different term when generating marketing material and engaging with external stakeholders?
What is #webperf most commonly known as, outside of the web development industry? (E.g. Marketing, UX, Execs)
— Simon Hearne (@simonhearne) May 1, 2020
Site speed or page speed are often mentioned by executives and analysts. I think we can assume that Google is to thank here! Web performance stats in Google Analytics are under the Site Speed
section, and PageSpeed Insights
is the Google tool to find performance issues. How often do we hear “We need to improve page speed” vs. “We need to improve web performance”?
Whilst certainly not scientific, a quick look on Google Trends shows that page speed
is by far the most common search term, followed at some distance by site speed
, with web performance
barely registering at ~5% relative interest.

Take a look at #SiteSpeed on Twitter and you will see tweets from a range of SEO, business and Marketing folks, whereas the #WebPerf hashtag is mainly technical tweets from folks in the industry, tools providers or front-end developers.
Web Performance and Web Performance Optimization are still valid and descriptive terms for our industry, but we might benefit from a change to our language when working with others. The language we use could be critical to the success of making the web a faster and more accessible place.
I’ll be testing this out with my messaging to clients, I’d be interested in your thoughts too. Some other ideas from the community:
- SSO (Site Speed Optimisation) - from Aaron Peters
- UXSpeed - from Sergey Chernyshev
- WebSpeed - from Šime Vidas
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IMO anything that impacts the speed of the user experience is in scope, from backend response through protocols and CDN to client side. Plus everything and everything in between! You can’t really have good #WebPerf with a bad back-end.
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Yes indeed! The sub-specialisms would be Front- and Back-end Optimisation. There’s a gap between the two which is delivery (DNS, TLS, HTTP, CDN & Caching). #WebPerf / #SiteSpeed covers the full stack (again, IMO)
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Exactly. However there is another branch - load. Managing and maintaining server side performance while introducing multiple simultaneous requests or concurrent users. They go hand in hand - but doesn’t feel like the words WebPerf or SiteSpeed cover it.
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That’s over to capacity planning & load testing, but still part of #WebPerf (as in back-end optimisation). Anything that slows down the user experience is in scope.
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I don’t want to say what execs are looking for - you are probably right that majority of their motivation is coming from Google ranking today, but I feel that your explanation here is why I am trying to rebrand it to “UX Speed”.
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Yes, I’ve thought the same! My potential worry is that speed could then be partitioned off as a UX specialism, when companies don’t invest as much as they should in UX either. We should sit alongside SEO, UX, Dev and Marketing.
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I feel we need to be aligned with finance as well, but there does not seem to be anything that unifies all of that other than experience of the users.
I feel that the answer is in helping people work together across departments and a name should appeal to them all.
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I feel that the core need for renaming #webperf is to support creating fast user experiences earlier in product cycle because today it is mostly considered an engineering task and mostly optimization post factum, but reality is that it’s a product design task. #UXSpeed
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SEO, CRO … two well established terms and activities that are on all web teams’ agendas. Why not SSO? Site Speed Optimization? I like UX Speed too. Naming is hard.
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SSO is Single Sign-On - will bring too much confusion. I feel that putting Optiomization as part of #WPO was a mistake as we tried to align with existing SEO and name never took hold. I agree with Simon that Google’s marketing it and their hook made #SiteSpeed most popular today.
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Agree. SSO is poor. Agree on WPO taking off because of efforts by Google. I would be fine with site speed because … it is about the speed of the site.
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Interesting! We definitely use different terms interchangeably when creating posts and articles. Would be nice to have an industry standard
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The difference between “site speed” (or “page speed”) and “web performance” might come from the fact that people using “speed” focus on their own site speed, while we (as a tech community) want to promote performance for the whole Web.
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Rebranding is fine, but it needs some education around it too. People want fast, but businesses also want revenue and data. When we’re talking milliseconds, that doesn’t doesn’t really sound like a lot of time to people.
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#Webperformance needs a rebrand! What does the term “Web performance” means to you? Site speed, Marketing campaign performance, etc.? simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo… #webperformance #sitespeed #webperf #perfmattersview
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Proč bychom „rychlosti webu“ neměli říkat „webová performance“. #PageSpeed je lepší než #WebPerf prostě proto, že se lépe domluvíme s netechnickými lidmi. (Nemluvě o tom, že pod „performance“ si mnozí představí úplně něco jiného.) simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…view
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作者:renpin 本期看点 Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake https://iism.org/article/driving-engineers-to-an-arbitrary-date-is-a-value-destroying-mistake-49 In this article we’ll be concentrating on high value software projects and why driving engineers to create detailed estimates for these projects, and then pressuring them to complete the software according to those estimates, is a value destroying mistake. Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com https://engineering.fb.com/web/facebook-redesign/ 译文 https://www.yuque.com/docs/share/6aee9dd5-da3f-462b-b4bd-caec0ec6f60e When we thought about how we would build a new web app — one designed for today’s browsers, with the features people expect from Facebook — we realized that our existing tech stack wasn’t able to support the app-like feel and performance we needed. A complete rewrite is extremely rare, but in this case, since so much has changed on the web over the course of the past decade, we knew...view
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Interesting read from @simonhearne - do you call it site speed, page speed, web performance or maybe something else? simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…view
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WebPerf はリブランドすべき? Page Speed や Site Speed のほうがメジャーという指摘です。 simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo… #webperf #pagespeedview
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“Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand?” – Simon Hearne asks. I believe it is. Thoughts align with his on a proposed full stack, and infrastructure, inclusive approach. simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…view
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Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? – Simon Hearne simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…view
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simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…view
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Very interesting question. May seem unimportant, but a more consistent naming might bring it forward in designer/developer minds.view
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A more understandable name for #webperf can be helpful. But what we need is widespread understanding of its importance as the pillar of UX and a prerequisite for equal access. Equal access is a human right. That’s more important than naming. simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…view
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Top story: Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? – Simon Hearne simonhearne.com/2020/web-perfo…, see more tweetedtimes.com/v/10101?s=tnpview
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for mass adoption a benefit & goal would be helpful. “seo” works because everyone understand the benefit & goal of “search engine optimisation”. on its own “site speed” is just a measurement, so “sso” for “site speed optimisation” might have a better hope?view
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Interesting post and observations. Is #webperf too niche a term? Or on the flip side not specific enough? Should we be using #sitespeed instead?view
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Jeremy Keith bookmarked a post https://simonhearne.com/2020/web-performance-rebrand/