Obsessing over first-page load time sabotages ecommerce businesses

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A flawed approach to page speed measurement is sabotaging ecommerce sites. There, I said it.Now I know this might be an exaggeration, but it really is time for a change. A historical focus on network-based metrics — bytes downloaded per page or assets per page, for example — and an excessive emphasis placed on first-page load times have meant the rest of the customer journey on the web has suffered.Developers and product managers have been relying on tools like Google’sLighthouseto measure page load speed, and once the search giant began considering mobile page speeds in its website ranking algorithm, that reliance only grew.Unfortunately, while Lighthouse and similar tools are great for measuring first-page loads, they don’t measure browsing speed — the time it takes to transition from one page to the next. That’s a glaring omission.We build what we measureMobile UX expert Luke Wroblewski hassummed the problem up nicely: “People unlock their phones around 80 times a day. … Mo…