The perfect limits

koality.io fully keeps track of all important properties of a successful website and compares them with set threshold values. If the current value deviates, an alarm is raised. Of course, the thresholds don't have to be set manually, because koality.io comes with a standard set of best practices in its luggage. But what are good values for my project?

The good news up front: in koality.io, thresholds can be changed. So what is slow for one person may be in the green for another. For professional websites you should analyze two things to find your own limits: How optimized could the page be in the best case and how fast are the competitors.

Optimum

For the optimum, we have taken the values that we have achieved in recent years when we have helped companies improve their websites. We also focus in this list on the points that koality.io can measure and where thresholds can be set.

• Server Load Time: The server load time is probably the easiest to optimize. Thanks to caching and CDN, values in the millisecond range are feasible here. A good value here for HTML pages is under 200 ms.

• Browser load time**: Browser loading times are very dependent on the page type. Therefore, no optimum can be given here. If it is an ad-financed website, then surely the loading of the ad banners will bring the page to at least 8 seconds. If it is based very strongly on JavaScript, the value can also be 5 seconds, if it is initially called up in the browser. Classic HTML pages, however, should be able to be optimized down to 2-3 seconds.

• Page size: The classic, as small as possible, as large as necessary. Image-heavy web pages should have a maximum of 5 megabytes in buzzer, rather text-heavy ones can also get by with less than one megabyte. There is no silver bullet here, just remember that omitting large, beautiful images always means that the user may not feel as addressed as he could.

• Google Lighthouse Performance: 100th point. It's not a very big challenge to get the Google metric for performance into the high nineties. That's why 100 is the goal and anything above 90 is easily acceptable.

• Cookies: Cookies fall a bit out of the list here, where it's kind of always about performance after all. Nevertheless, it is the threshold at which we get the most questions. Here, of course, the smallest possible value is advantageous if you want to comply with the GDPR. Desirable would be zero. That means no cookie is set as long as the user has not agreed to it. However, 2 or 3 are realistic, since technically necessary cookies may be handled differently.

Competitor

The beauty of the Internet is that all data is openly available to everyone. This means that you can measure the current performance and cookie values of other websites just as you measure your own. The most elegant way would be to run koality.io for a short while (1 month) for the biggest competitor as well. Then you know exactly how their pages behave or you can put them in relation to your own. This analysis will cost you 10 EUR, which should be absolutely in your budget if you want to optimize your website.

Of course, you can also take the manual route and read out all the important data via a browser and note it down. Is a little more elaborate, but free. All important data can be read out via the developer console. Especially the network tab does its job here.

Set in koality.io

No matter what thresholds you decide to use in monitoring, they must be entered into koality.io. This is always done directly on the collected metrics and is visible to any project administrator.

We decided to keep the settings simple by providing predefined thresholds to choose from. If ever a threshold needs to be added, this can be done by our team at any time. However, we are of the opinion that we have chosen the right intervals.

If you want to optimize your website, you should visit our magazine more often, because this is exactly the topic we have taken up here. And can already shine here in several dozens, optimized projects.