What is Acquia Optimize Performance?
Our Performance Module monitors your website’s performance, and automatically identifies elements that slow down the website.
- Based on the Google Lighthouse engine
- Focuses on factors that impact the user’s page experience, such as:
- How fast is your website loading?
- How long does it take for it to become interactive?
- Highlights opportunities for improving performance, sorted by priority and difficulty
- Shows your performance score over time
Why should you invest in Web Performance?
The investment in a simple and custom website is above $10.000, and therefore optimizing your speed page loading and performance is at the heart of site experience. Web traffic optimization is about average time spent on site with decrease bounce rates (the number of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site), and increase conversion rates (represents the promotion of call-to-action buttons).
Google has started making page experience an official search engine ranking factor with rollout expected to be completed in March 2022.
There’s a ton of data out there on the correlation between load time and visitor retention, for example:
- The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds
- For every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%
What are the types of performance metrics?
Acquia Optimize Performance is based on Google's Web Vitals metric based on Google Lighthouse. Google's Web Vitals measure the page experience that you provide to your website visitors. The new metrics focus on performance, stability, and interactivity. This means that the better your site scores on the new parameters, the higher your site will appear in Google search engine rank.
The six metrics correspond to the Google Web Vitals:
Core Web Vitals
#1 Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- This metric represents the time duration between the user initiating the page load and the page rendering its primary content.
#2 First Input Delay (FID)
- It measures a page's load responsiveness and helps identify situations where a page looks interactive but actually isn't.
#3 Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- This is the measurement of the movement of visible elements within the viewport.
Supplementary Web Vitals
#4 Total Blocking Time (TBT)
- This is the sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive (when the task length exceeded 50ms), expressed in milliseconds.
#5 Time to Interactivity (TTI)
- It measures a page's load responsiveness and helps identify situations where a page looks interactive but actually isn't.
#6 Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- It represents the time between the browser requesting a page and when it receives the first byte of information from the server.
What does the new update for performance mean?
Acquia Optimize Performance changed the metrics based on the industrial standard v5 to v8.5. It means that the new metrics and weight calculation will be measured to determine how well your website performs. For those reasons, you are likely to see a change in your Performance Score once the upgrade is released.
Some of these scores are not visible in the report but are calculated into the score in the background.
The History Center will display an indication that the version has changed, to help users understand why the Performance score shows a sudden jump.
For more information on how the scores are calculated after the upgrade, see:
Lighthouse 5
Lighthouse 8
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