Present Your Website Performance Findings with this Helpful Optimization Report Template

This article is part of our Improving Website Performance Series, where we'll help you establish a baseline for your site, review the key levers we look to for performance improvements, and point you in the right direction as you get started.

Presenting your findings

Your website doesn’t need to be the fastest on the internet (this is especially true if you value a rich brand experience), so don’t make that your goal. But your website does need to perform well — hopefully, better than well — to meet the baseline of customer expectations for performance.

There are usually competing interests in optimizing a website, and we sometimes see those escalate and create tension amongst client teams. Bad performance can cause real user frustration, abandonment of carts, and just a poor experience for your most important asset: your customers.
 
In the Website Performance Series, we cover three main messages:

1. Performance is a user’s perception of when your website has loaded. 

2. A single webpage requires loading hundreds of individual elements (and many of those elements are being referenced from other places and applications).

3. There are four key levers at your disposal for improving site performance. 


When clients come to us for help with their website performance, we often start by presenting back performance findings and recommendations. This helps to get teams on the same page, allows for discussion of competing goals, and center discussions around the top few elements that could greatly improve their website’s performance.
 
We’ve created a sample Website Optimization Report you can adapt to your situation. It has a few sections described below:

Section 1: Background

Start with an overview of all the feedback you've received. This includes customers' reported experiences, management and site administrators speed experiences, reports from the hosting company, or other types of anecdotal evidence.
 
 We also like to include a slide with the overview of the four main levers available:

• Design/UX & page assets / page weight 

• External loading services

• Server speed

• Caching


Section 2: Analysis

Following the guidelines in the blog How to Measure Your Website Speed, we provide a summary of the metrics used for analysis. This can be from Google Developer Tools network view, GT Metrix/Lighthouse, server performance tools, code and extension audits, cache configuration. For top-three metrics that Google includes in its signals for SEO, have a look at our post on Core Web Vitals.

By consolidating and comparing the results from these reports, you will be able to triangulate the key issues slowing down the site.