As we wrap up 2023, we have taken a moment to reflect on the year’s journey.
It’s been 12 months marked by significant milestones and transformative experiences, and we can confidently declare 2023 as the year of:
- Connecting with our customers – Our team had the wonderful opportunity to connect with many of you, our valued customers, across three WordCamps, performance.now() conference, and more virtual events.
- Levelling up our product – All NitroPack users are now enjoying a fully revamped dashboard, better settings structure, enriched insights, new features and a unified subscription management system.
- Helping website owners navigate the web performance world – Holding several collaborative webinars with Google, we were honored to share the latest advancements in web performance. From optimizing for Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to providing instant site experiences, we’ve been dedicated to equipping our customers with cutting-edge knowledge and tools.
And we’re just scratching the surface.
So, let’s revisit more of these pivotal moments and breakthroughs that shaped our year.
Our customers saved their visitors 438 years in loading times
In 2023, our customer base grew to more than 190,000 websites.
These hundreds of thousands of business owners choose NitroPack daily to have a website that loads fast.
And that’s our mission:
Allowing people from all kinds of industries and technical backgrounds to gain a competitive advantage through websites that offer a world-class user experience.
So, in the past 12 months, we worked hard to stand up to our promise:
- 464 stability fixes deployed
- 18 WordPress plugin updates
- 2938 backend improvements introduced
And thanks to your trust, together we:
- optimized 1,704,904,455 pages
- saved 364 TB of bandwidth
But the most remarkable achievement is that all these numbers translate into:
3,837,861 hours of loading time saved.
Put another way, you saved your visitors 438 years of waiting time! This, for sure, gives you some bragging rights.
For another year, more than 90% of the NitroPack-optimized pages loaded within 3 seconds
Several months ago, we conducted research and ended up with the following findings:
- Users who experienced a load time of 3 seconds or less visited 60% more pages.
- Visitors lose patience and disproportionally start to abandon a web page at 2.75s of the page load.
The 3-second threshold isn’t a new ideology, with Google setting the limit years ago. However, this research only cemented the importance of the “3-second rule”.
With 90.10% of NitroPack optimized pages loading within 3 seconds, it’s safe to say that your visitors enjoyed a seamless user experience and snappy interactions.
Together, we achieved performance results that matter
We don’t want to sound like a broken record, but having a fast-loading website isn’t only about shaving off a couple of seconds. It’s truly about how visitors perceive and experience your pages.
And there’s no better indicator than Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Well, according to the Core Web Vitals Technology Report, NitroPack’s users have been leading the way in providing excellent user experience:
Also, beyond the CWV, NitroPack is leading the way in two of the most important metrics out there – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Total Page Weight.
According to Chrome statistics, LCP is the metric that website owners struggle with most. Well, we’re glad to say that:
57.62% of NitroPack’s websites with CrUX data on mobile and 63.07% on desktop have good LCP.
Furthermore, NitroPack is the leader in total page weight – a crucial metric that impacts the website’s overall performance, especially the upcoming Core Web Vital – Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
Beyond the business metrics (or how your fast-loading websites made the Planet a better place)
Passed Core Web Vitals, years of loading time saved, and improved conversion rates – undoubtedly vital metrics every business should strive for.
But…
At the beginning of the year, we decided that we needed to talk more about the greater good that speeding up a website brings:
Massively reducing the global carbon footprint.
The truth is that our efforts go beyond simply improving business metrics. Our focus has always been to ensure faster web experiences with environmental sustainability.
And this year, we’re thrilled to say that through our advanced optimizations, our customers reduced their sites’ carbon footprint by 3,660,520,500 kg.
This substantial figure is equivalent to saving 677,025 kWh of energy.
To put this into perspective, it’s akin to powering 57 households for a whole year.
Also, this achievement translates to a reduction of 75.5% in greenhouse gas emissions compared to running non-optimized websites.
A truly fantastic stat, but we plan on doubling down on our efforts to find even more ways of making a tangible impact on energy consumption and emissions.
NitroPack’s app and service continue to get better and better
2023 was the year of product improvements.
And make no mistake, our Figma is full of in-progress projects that wait to be released in 2024.
Unfortunately, we can’t cover all releases, so here’s a quick highlight reel of the BIGGEST ones:
Revamped Dashboard, Settings, and Cache Insights
Our ongoing mission is to make the NitroPack app our clients’ centralized hub for all things web performance. This year, we started with introducing UX/UI improvements, better settings structuring, and new analytics widgets.
Made site management easier
The web performance optimization process can be a daunting task sometimes. Not if you share the challenge with your team. That’s why we introduced Team Management – a feature that allows our users to share their accounts with their team, making managing their website easier.
Streamlined NitroPack’s subscription management
At the core, NitroPack is a solution that aims to turn a complicated process like web performance optimization into an achievable task for anyone and everyone. Well, we applied this ideology to our subscription management system, introducing Stripe as our new payment provider.
Now, all our customer can handle their subscriptions easily, enjoying a single billing period, faster checkout, and full control over their overages.
Provided lightning-fast responses via our Live Chat
2023 marked an exciting leap in our customer service approach with the launch of live chat – a game-changer in how we interact with our users.
There’s no need to say that in the fast-paced world of web performance, speed is everything.
That’s why we’ve introduced live chat support, ensuring that our users get not only fast-loading websites but also rapid responses to their queries. This move was all about elevating our commitment to serve our customers with instant, on-the-spot support, making their experience with us even more seamless and responsive.
2023 brought us closer to our customers and the web performance community around the world
2023 has been a landmark year for us at NitroPack, not just in terms of technological advancements but also in strengthening our connections within the web performance community.
This year presented us with numerous opportunities to engage with all of you, website owners, web performance experts, and site speed enthusiasts from all corners of the world.
The array of events we participated in this year, both virtual and in-person, has been nothing short of spectacular.
One of the year’s highlights was our participation in Google’s prestigious annual conference, Google I/O. Attending both the Amsterdam and Mountain View events, we had the privilege of engaging with some of the brightest minds shaping the future of the web performance industry. The insights and discussions from this event have been invaluable in guiding our product development.
Our journey continued at WordCamp, an event that holds a special place in our hearts. We had the pleasure of attending WordCamp US, Europe, and Bulgaria, thereby tripling our opportunities to reconnect with our dedicated WordPress user base.
Adding to our eventful year, we also visited the performance.now() conference – an event known for gathering the best and brightest in web performance optimization. It was the perfect ground for exchanging ideas and learning about the latest advancements in the field.
As we look to the future, we’re excited to announce that we’ve already secured our tickets for WordCamp Asia 2024!
We can’t wait to meet you there.
Empowered Our Users with Tools for Navigating the Web Performance Landscape
Web performance is a complex topic. All the technicalities, different metrics, and various optimization strategies make it a nuanced and challenging field.
That’s why we’ve been working hard to provide you and all website owners interested in page speed with resources to help you better navigate the web performance world.
Starting with publishing 57 blog articles, but also:
Held a “Core Web Vitals for your business” webinar series with Google
During our visit to Google I/O, one thing became clear – we have a shared mission with Google to make web performance optimization an accessible topic for all site owners out there.
So, six months after we first met up, we’re glad to say that we held three out of four webinars of our “Core Web Vitals for your business” webinar series:
- Improve Core Web Vitals and Real-User Experience
- How to Improve Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- How to Fix Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Also, our fourth and last episode will take place in January 2024, and it will be about the impact of instant loading:
“On top of continuing the existing trend in improvements for Core Web Vitals, I think 2024 could be the year of the “instant web” with Chrome’s Speculation Rules API hitting the mainstream and making prerender an easy addition for many sites. ”
— Barry Pollard, Developer Relations Engineer @Google Chrome
Answered your page speed questions during our Office Hours
For the first time this year, we started our Office Hours sessions, where we answered some of your most asked questions in depth.
We started with videos on:
- Why a 90+ page speed score isn’t enough
- Reducing HTTP Requests: Effective Techniques to Speed Up Your Website
- How to Reduce Page Load Time: Practical Tips
If you’re interested in this type of content, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, join our Facebook community or follow us on LinkedIn to be notified of the next Office Hours.
What’s Next for NitroPack in 2024?
In the past 12 months, we saw the whole industry (and our users) increasingly turn to field data to provide great real-world experiences.
So, in 2024, we plan on doubling down our efforts to provide users with more and better ways of improving and measuring their real-world performance:
- Significantly enhancing NitroPack’s app to provide more visibility on your performance
- Advanced features that will enhance our users’ metrics and load times
- Doubling down on our impact on the environment
“Looking ahead to 2024, I see a positive shift in how we approach web performance. We’re moving away from just looking at lab data and focusing more on the actual user experience. It’s an exciting time with lots of new ideas coming up to make websites faster for everyone. At NitroPack, we’re thrilled to be part of this change, helping to make the web a better place for users.”
— Georgi Petrov, CEO and co-founder @NitroPack
Here’s to a faster 2024. Stay tuned!
