Performance Audits and Code Reviews

Your website is too slow. I can tell you why.

You could be leaving hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue on the table every year due to a poorly- or un-optimised website. Slow websites are one of online consumers’ biggest frustrations, and a fast way to miss out on sales.

Whether you want to boost revenues, improve conversion rates, reduce churn, or improve retention and engagement, a well-optimised site is a key way to get there.

How It Works

All it takes is five straightforward steps to turn your site around:

Harry’s performance audit gave comprehensive, forensic insight across the full delivery pipeline. Clearly highlighted priorities brought rapid benefits and a plan for continued improvement. Genius.

Peter Gibb, ICAEW

1. Survey: To begin, I need to know a lot about your organisation, the problems you feel you face, and what we need to concentrate on. I’ll send a series of very focused questions that will help me to understand the business’ needs immediately.
2. Audit: Remotely, I roll up my sleeves and dig in! With an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things web-performance, nothing will evade me. From infrastructure and the network, to assets and payloads; from CSS and fonts, to runtime and rendering (and everything in between), we have a lot to pay attention to. I’ll spend at least five days looking through everything I can get my hands on.
3. Report: Once I’ve uncovered everything, I’ll put together a full report outlining all of the issues and problems that exist, as well as preemptive optimisations we could make in order to be even faster. The report will contain actionable and prioritised tasks that you and your engineers can begin to implement in a sensible and considered order.
4. Handover: Once you and your team have had chance to read and digest the report, you’ll likely have some questions or comments. We’ll hold a formal handover session to ensure that you fully understand the entirety of the audit document and know what you need to do next.
5. Reconvene: One to three months later—depending on what would be most appropriate for your organisation—I’ll drop back in and conduct a brief audit against your to-do list that I left you with. This phase ensures you’re accountable, as well as shows me where any regressions may have happened or what you may have struggled to overcome.

Existing Issues and Opportunistic Optimisations

Harry’s focused, practical approach allowed us to implement significant changes which improved our user experience and overall performance dramatically. I recommend him wholeheartedly.

Rich Fogarty, Concrete Playground

As well as uncovering existing issues that are impacting site performance, I’ll also be sure to make recommendations where opportunistic optimisations are concerned: are there any new web platform features we can utilise? Different approaches we could be taking? Bleeding edge features that we can begin to introduce? Instead of just making your site better, let’s make it a class-leader.

Deliverables

Once the audit is complete, you receive:

• Audit Document: An extensive, detailed report that covers everything that the investigation uncovered. It is not uncommon for these audits to run into the thousands of words, so I ensure it is broken into clear, thematic sections with defined action points. This document becomes the canonical reference for your engineering team. As well as developer-facing, technical insights, I will include a business-oriented executive summary that highlights key findings and their expected impact.
• Performance Backlog: A Trello board that I populate as I review the site will be made available to your team. Cards have clear checklists covering everything from common pitfalls to long-term optimisations. Key tasks are created and loosely prioritised in order for your team to hit the ground running.
• Half-Day Handover: Scheduled for some time after delivery of the report, we’ll set aside a half-day for a call in which your engineers can ask questions about my findings, I can explain anything that requires it, we can look to discuss longer-term strategies, and generally close up the project with a formal handover session.
• Check-In: Rather than simply leaving you to get on with things unassisted, I will check back in within one to three months to see what progress has been made—and maintained!—as well as to see what outstanding issues or unresolved problems there might be.

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