Page Speed Initiative

Phillip

I would love to see Unbounce take on an initiative to speed up our landing pages.

Having a fast website is not optional anymore…it is essential!

If you aren’t already, you should be measuring all of our page load times (particular high latency environments such as mobile). Then you can monitor how development impacts page speed over time.

Some Suggestions:

  • Consolidate External JavaScript - Currently Unbounce has 6 external scripts loaded from 2 different Unbounce domains. On mobile, the latency for downloading these files slows the page substantially. These are loading in the head, which blocks the rest of the page from loading.

  • Better Font Handling/Suggestions - I recently discovered some of my pages were loading fonts which were not being used. Fortunately, Unbounce Support was great and helped me remove them. But I can’t help but wonder how many other users have too many fonts on their pages. To help other users, the fonts currently used on the page should be highlighted at the top of the font drop-down field (to encourage using the same font). There should also be a warning message presented when adding multiple fonts. (“Warning: You are loading 3 fonts on this page. This will cause this page to load more slowly. We recommend only using 1-2 fonts.”)

  • HTTP/2 with Server Push - Besides the benefits of the HTTP/2 protocol, Server Push will allow the page to begin loading all the assets on the page without needing to wait for the HTML to download.

11 replies

Jess
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

Hey Phillip!

Thanks for passing along this well-constructed feedback. There are some items on this list that are currently in the making, and some of it is still in our roadmap. I’ve tapped @Matt_Coady on the shoulder to field some of these topics as he has further insight into where we’re at in rolling these out.

In the meantime, I’ve forwarded this post (word for word) to our Product team. I’ll reach out to you directly if I hear anything back!

Cheers!

Matt_Coady

Hey Phillip,

I’m Matt a Front End Engineer here at Unbounce. Good news about the fonts, we’re completely revamping the way we handle fonts and it’s a project we’re actively working on. I can’t give any more details at the moment but keep an eye out for that.

As for consolidating external javascript, published page speeds are on our radar as a high priority fix and this is one of the points that have come up. No word on this yet but it’s something we’re looking into.

HTTP/2 can be a little tougher because we currently support back to IE9 where HTTP2 doesn’t exist so we need to make sure there won’t be any changes that negatively affect our published pages.

Page speed performance overall is something we’re going to continue to address, particularly as we’re breaking into markets that don’t have the same high speed access as denser areas. Thanks again for the feedback!

Cheers!

CoviuApp

I totally support this. Our pages are pretty big and there is a lot of css repetition on them also. Thanks would be great to get better page speed, particularly outside the US.

Phillip
Phillip
S

Hey Phillip, thanks for your detailed recommendations. I have to tell you I just switched over from Instapage and thought it was a great move, but I am definitely having second thoughts. Here is why;

Preface: I am using the unbounce wp plug in for an existing site.

Homepage load: 6.6s
Unbounce landing load: 11.3s

Details of unbounce landing page: one form with 4 fields, rest is simple.

What can I do to get this time up? I am using this page for ppc, and i would most definitely leave if a website took that long to load.

Steve_Mynett
Rank

Hey! Do you mind if I ask how you’re measuring page speed on this page? I took a look and page load time was pretty quick (1.8 seconds on Chrome Cable connection measuring from eastern US on first visit) but there are lots of other factors that can cause a variation with & slower load times. I also noticed that, although your page is fairly simple there is a large background image that could be optimized to positively influence load times.

Rebuilding our publishing service is one of the significant tasks we are actively looking at but that it won’t be for several months as it’s a tremendous amount of work for our Product team. Thanks!

Phillip

Thanks for following up @Steve_Mynett.

I primarily use webpagetest.org.

We just completed a page speed initiative on our main Wordpress site. For that, we also used tools.pingdom.com and gtmetrix.com.

75% of our visitors are using mobile devices. With this in mind, we have to account for the slower connection speed, and more importantly, the connection latency.

Phillip

Related article released today on Smashing Magazine: Quick Wins For Improving Performance And Security Of Your Website

C

Thanks for posting this. Any tips where I can make big speed improvements on mobile version? Currently loading in 6 secs…

Nicholas
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Hey there, this post from @digibomb a while back has some great tips for optimizing your pages: How to Speed Up Unbounce Pages?

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