{"id":12596,"date":"2017-05-09T17:50:03","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T16:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=12596"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:57:58","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:57:58","slug":"bringing-visibility-to-technical-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/bringing-visibility-to-technical-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"How we convinced everyone to care about technical performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Be it a marketing site that\u2019s slower than your competitors’, an app that crashes on install, or a blog post that never loads, technical performance directly or indirectly impacts everyone at your company.<\/p>\n

So why is performance often a black box that\u2019s only cared for by a select few engineers at a company? Much has to do with communication. Performance improvements are often explained with complicated metrics and graphs, which make it hard for people to see the real impact it has on their day to day work. Exactly how slow are we talking about? What is the benchmark we are comparing it against?<\/p>\n

Performance might be one of the most invisible parts of the user\u2019s experience but it\u2019s one of the most important. Intuit recently shared\u00a0their efforts<\/a> on reducing page load time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds (over 5x). During that effort, they observed a dramatic increase in conversions, for every decrease in page load time. For example, Intuit launched a new payroll platform, which led to an increase in page load time and a decrease in conversion rates. After improving the page load times by 2.5x, they saw a 14% increase in conversion rates.<\/p>\n

Having the right information available to the right people can make a big and impactful difference, which is why caring about performance and optimization should be a shared responsibility across your organization. To make sure it matters to more than just engineers, we very recently took a small step internally and brought easily comprehensible performance metrics to the attention of our fellow Intercomrades (yes, that’s what we like to call ourselves ?).<\/p>\n

What did we do?<\/h2>\n

Being part of a growing company presents numerous opportunities for optimization. Some of them are public facing, some are behind the scenes and some are purely for an engineer\u2019s satisfaction. With more than 40,000 visits every day, Intercom\u2019s website is one of the first things a potential customer or visitor comes across when learning about Intercom, which made it a perfect candidate for high impact performance upgrades.<\/p>\n

A very small team of engineers set out to improve the load time of the site. We started with our page load time average, which at the time was 4.5 seconds. The first step was to identify the bottlenecks \u2013 Chrome DevTools<\/a> was immensely helpful for this. Then we performed a series of operations that directly impacted the amount of data transfer, page load time, number of requests being made and caching and compression behaviors. Here is a short rundown of the tasks we performed:<\/p>\n