Once you've audited a site, make sure to package the results in a digestible form.
- Consider producing different reports for different stakeholders.
- Focus on business needs and show how technical metrics support these.
- Start with a summary.
- Structure data by topic (such as load performance and page weight) rather than simply listing tool output data.
- Order results by priority.
- Leave out results if they're not relevant or interesting.
- Where possible present numerical data as charts or graphs.
- Avoid a wall of data — site reviews should not be boring.
Be sensitive to the people on the receiving end of your audit.
Those working on a site may be well aware of problems. There may be complex, non-technical reasons why problems haven't been fixed.
It's much more helpful to describe poor performance in terms of opportunities and solutions, rather than simply listing a catalog of failures.
Wherever possible, talk to site developers and other stakeholders before presenting your findings more widely.
Provide context
When sharing review results you may want to include contextual data to justify effort and motivate developers or other stakeholders to implement improvements you suggest — such as the following from DoubleClick:
- 53% of users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load.
- Mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue.
- The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds.
There is a comprehensive list of business reasons for improving performance on neotys.com. More information about how to improve site performance is available from perf.rocks and Web Fundamentals, along with case studies and success stories.
If you don't have a performance budget, now is the time! Calculate a budget and show how your site weighs up.
Demonstrate potential
Chrome DevTools Local Overrides allow you to override website assets with local versions. This can be a great way to show how simple changes can make a big difference.
For example:
- Create a version of the CSS used by a site's homepage, with redundant rules removed.
- Change HTML to defer JavaScript loading.
- Replace image files with optimized versions.
You can even share changed files with developers working on a site, to enable them to demonstrate potential improvements directly to their colleagues. Local Overrides also makes it simple to create side-by-side screencasts showing performance differences between optimized and unoptimized versions. This approach can be much more compelling than a lengthy todo list! Find out how to use Local Overrides here.