When I launched the new website for Elevate Your Tech (EYT), I was honestly a bit nervous to run the first official performance test.
Even though I knew that I designed it from the ground up for speed, hitting the “Test Now” button to generate a GTmetrix report is truly a “cross your fingers” moment. The outcome? Awesome results across the board!
The EYT website received an overall grade of A, a performance rating of 99%, and a structure rating of 99%. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was just 777ms (less than a second!). LCP is a key Google Core Web Vital that measures how fast the main content of a web page takes to fully load.
Why does this matter? Not only does Google reward fast sites with better search rankings, but users are also far more likely to stay on a snappy website that loads in under a second. In an online world full of bloated WordPress websites built with slow-loading templates, website performance is a distinct competitive advantage.
After seeing how well the EYT website performed and breathing a quick sigh of relief, the next question that came to my mind was how the EYT website stacked up against the competition. I naturally assumed that (like me) other local web developers would have devoted hours to carefully optimizing the performance of their websites.
And boy, was I wrong!
The Speed Test: Elevate Your Tech vs. Other Edmonton Web Development Companies
I put this to the test by selecting a sample of nine local web development agencies to compare with EYT, and then running a bulk test on all ten websites with GTmetrix. To keep things professional, I have intentionally obscured the URLs of the nine agencies, and the results are ordered by Fully Loaded Times (the Page Load column).
Other diagnostic results, such as LCP, Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are all important metrics for overall website performance, but for a non-techy reader, I personally think that page load times are the most intuitive. Simply put, your potential customers are far more likely to be happy with your website if it loads quickly for them. They are also very likely to move onto something else if your website loads slowly and painfully.
With this in mind, let’s focus on Page Load times:
- Elevate Your Tech: 1.2 seconds
- Average Competitor Website: 5.5 seconds (excluding the slowest outlier)
- Slowest Website Outlier: 18.7 seconds (yikes!)
Now put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer visiting your website. Each additional second it takes for your pages to load increases the probability that they’re going to “bounce” and move onto another website (possibly your competitor!).
Keep in mind as well that these results are based on a decent internet connection. Things get even worse if a customer is trying to visit your website on a less-than-ideal cellular data connection while they’re out shopping or running errands around town.
The Technical Gap: Why Many Edmonton Web Developers Deliver Sluggish Websites
How did I manage to achieve a fully loaded time of 1.2 seconds for the Elevate Your Tech website, whereas the average Edmonton web developer site keeps visitors waiting more than four times longer? The answer comes down to a carefully engineered technical architecture designed with performance in mind.
The unfortunate reality is that many web agencies deliver bloated WordPress websites that are built using off-the-shelf, slow-loading templates, or even point-and-click site builders. These sites require a database to function, they commonly rely on a bunch of plugins just to handle basic functionality, and they often “live” on cheap shared hosting servers alongside dozens or even hundreds of other unoptimized websites.
To achieve top-tier performance, I intentionally took a completely different path with the EYT website:
- No Database Overhead: Many websites don’t actually require a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, because they only consist of a handful of pages. Eliminating unnecessary database queries means that the web server can process requests faster, without waiting on a database for the data needed to render the web page for the user.
- Enterprise-Grade Managed Hosting: I personally vetted a wide range of options for web hosting, and I ultimately landed on a highly-scalable, enterprise-grade hosting vendor that delivers exceptional uptime and robust technical support.
- Minimal JavaScript: The EYT website renders as much of a web page as possible directly on the server, while simultaneously using as little client-side scripting as possible (specifically Alpine.js via Livewire) to keep browser thread execution incredibly light.
- Intuitive, Privacy-Friendly Visitor Analytics: Another key technical decision was to partner with a website analytics vendor that offers a lightweight, cookie-free script, instead of heavy, privacy-invasive tracking scripts that can negatively impact overall web browser performance.
In addition to these foundational pillars, our proprietary, component-based design system has also been carefully hand-coded from scratch. It’s powered behind the scenes by Laravel, the mature, battle-tested PHP framework of choice for web artisans, with a 15+ year track record.
Beyond Aesthetics: Elevating the Performance Bar for Edmonton Web Design
The results of our speed testing experiment ultimately raise an interesting question. If your web development agency can’t be bothered to optimize the performance of their own website, how fast are the websites that they are delivering for their clients?
Your business website shouldn't just look pretty on a desktop monitor. It also needs to perform well on a customer’s mobile device and be optimized to display well on that device (i.e., it needs to have a “responsive” layout design), because more than 50% of the traffic to your site will be from mobile browsers as opposed to desktop browsers.
Website performance isn’t just a “nice-to-have” feature, it’s a competitive advantage for your business!
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About the Author
John is a multi-disciplinary professional who has spent twenty years mastering the intersection of business, finance, and information technology. His technical journey began with building and repairing computers, a foundation that led to him being recruited by a pioneering video alarm monitoring startup as a network administrator and web developer. He subsequently attended the University of Alberta, discovering a passion for finance while completing his Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he later became a CFA charterholder.
He has over a decade of experience in the finance industry, including roles with Canada’s largest independent mortgage finance company, a highly successful private lender, and a boutique private equity firm. John also previously owned and operated a dedicated IT consulting practice, and he was the sole web developer for an online media company that he co-founded.