Are you interested in analyzing online app load time? Here is a look at some of the key metrics you should be examining to see how quickly users can interact with your online applications.

3 Key Metrics for Analyzing Online App Load Time

How frequently are your online shopping and leaving a site because it is too slow? With something like a stock trading app, a non-performant app could cost you the commission as traders will find a faster way to close a trade to more easily get the trade price they want. It works the same way with almost everything else in the online world. If multiple online apps provide similar services, users will gravitate to the more responsive app one that more quickly gives them what they want.

How do you analyze your online app load time to make sure your app is the quickest? More importantly, what do you analyze? For starters, you can run your application through an analysis tool like websitetest.com to get a preliminary idea of where you are. Without baseline metrics, you’ll never know how much you improve the application performance. Google Analytics is another resource that can help you monitor important online application metrics.

1. Time to Display (T2D)

T2D is when the visible application elements are fully rendered. The quicker the Time to Display (T2D) performance, the more likely a user will become engaged with your online app. For each second of delay, there is a 7% chance a visitor will simply leave your app to complete their tasks elsewhere on the web. To increase performance, you want to make sure that the initial load of the app loads the right data quickly.

2. Time to Interact (T2I)

A second metric to examine is T2I or Time to Interact. This means the user can scroll, click, and use interactive features on the page. The distinction from T2D is important because while an app may display quickly if users can’t fully interact with it they are going to be just as frustrated as if they are seeing a blank screen. The median T2I time is over six seconds, while the faster sites are less than half that.

3. Content Complexity

Performance metrics vary considerably based on application type, whereas e-commerce apps tend to be slower due to their high dependency on displaying extra resources. With that said, a two-second slower interaction time has been shown to cause a 4.3% drop in per-user revenue.

You don’t want people abandoning their shopping carts due to performance, or lack thereof. Wherever possible, you want to reduce the number of resources needed, to reduce the number of roundtrips an app needs to make to the backend server. For instance, instead of loading 25 individual images, consider placing them all in a single image file, or “sprite” to reduce overhead. Small changes like this reduce resource dependency immensely with large-scale engagement improvements.

Key Takeaways

There is a whole science to strong UX design, of which performance is just part. Learn it or hire experts like Yottaa to help with analyzing online app load time and creating strategic solutions. Your competition is doing the same. Optimizations can always be improved upon. Some quick tips for improving online app load time and end-user experience include:

• Track metrics. Without hard numbers, there is no way to know what stands to be improved.
• Get your T2I / T2D numbers as low as possible, without giving up quality.
• Optimize an online application’s resource dependencies, to speed up performance.

There’s more to delivering a high-quality digital experience than creating a fast-loading application. Find out what you need to know to improve your end-user experience: download a free copy of our latest ebook, “Beyond CDN: A New Model for Digital Experience Delivery.”