I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster. They only care about performance issues if it causes a problem. If it does not, they couldn't care less.
The problem is the problems are hard to measure. How do you know that "Joe" bought from someone else because the competitors website just "felt better". We know from UX research how speed affects how things feel. We know that customers will go elsewhere at times. We also know not everyone who visits your site will buy. I know statisticians have tools to measure the loss, but I'm not able to tell you how they do it or how accurate they are (they can give you a range).
> I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster
But what do web developers want? What do web designers want? Some developers pride themselved on being craftsmen. They would write tests. They would design architectures. Why wouldn't they want websites they are building to be faster?
Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably.
A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI.
So even if you are a craftsmen, your colleagues aren't. They will never care, they have no incentive to, because management doesn't care.
I've totally given up with it and I can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?
> I've totally given up with it and I've can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money.
> Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?
I've just explained why. What part didn't you understand?
> Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money
I do (I like to know my code works). That doesn't mean other people will.
Much like site performance unless there is an emphasis on quality, then many developers won't bother writing tests.
I've had people copy and paste tests, then jig the code around so they got the green tick in the IDE. The feature didn't work at all. The test was complete nonsense. I have colleagues that put up PRs where the code doesn't even compile.
As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection, all I want is your site flows to make sense and any actions I take to be reliable and clearly handle errors. For things that are truly critical I want 99% of my UI to be precached by a native application, so we're only talking in data (and yes, keep that data small).
There are lots of good reasons to make your website faster, but given the number of sites I've seen that fall over and die if you block Google Analytics, I don't feel that it's the biggest issue most websites have.
> As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection
Sure, I get it. The same argument can be applied to web accessibility. Most frontend developers are young and healthy. Should they care about accessibility of the sites they build?
It’s not the same argument at all. Accessibility is important. What I’m saying is if you want it to be fast offload the UI to a native app, don’t even bother me with a web page. If it’s critical serve it in plain text or simple HTML. Either of those are both fast and accessible.
The idea that most websites should broadly work for people even on a 2G signal is absurd. Some should. However I’m not going to try to configure a BMW and email dealers from the middle of the woods, and I’m sure they know their target audience is not either.
> It’s not the same argument at all. Accessibility is important. What I’m saying is if you want it to be fast offload the UI to a native app, don’t even bother me with a web page. If it’s critical serve it in plain text or simple HTML. Either of those are both fast and accessible.
A web page and a native app all suffer from the same issue. It frequently needs to talk to a server somewhere. No you are downloading the UI/Logic, but often it needs to talk to a server.
> The idea that most websites should broadly work for people even on a 2G signal is absurd.
I worked in a large company and we did optimise for some random guy that was in Spain on a crappy 2G/3G signal (this was a real customer). It was a good test case of how the app responded with a poor bandwidth & signal. As a result the application would behave well when having poor signal.
Large companies such as google pore huge resources into optimising, that why YouTube (both their app and their mobile site) will work on a flakey connection on a train going through the countryside and something like kick.com won't.
Often It isn't the bandwidth that is frequently the issue. It is the latency between requests and stability of a signal. Sometimes a request can fail, the phone goes to sleep and sometimes that can suspend the browser thread. This affects higher bandwidth connections such as 4G and 5G.
If the web site/web app or even native app is coded poorly often you will get into a state where you have to reload the app.
Also downloading an app could be relatively large compared to a web page. If you just want to check the train times / bus times / closing time of a shop or similar it will take longer to use the app as you need to download the whole thing first.
> However I’m not going to try to configure a BMW and email dealers from the middle of the woods, and I’m sure they know their target audience is not either.
Things like this do happen. I've bought vehicles from farmhouses in the middle of nowhere in the UK. Bank transfers, road tax I have literally done in someone's garden.