Union Bank of Nigeria's Loading Issues

In this post, Union bank will be used as the subject case. We'll analyze their website and attempt to find issues as well as solutions to the issues. Read more on how to address speed issues on your website.

On mobile, the Union Bank of Nigeria's website is relatively slow compared to other banking websites in the world.

According to PageSpeed Insights the First Contentful Paint (FCP), which is usually the first sight of content one sees to signify that the page is indeed loading, starts at 4.9 seconds. Note for First Contentful Paint to be considered good, it should be less than 1.8 seconds. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which usually is the largest asset on the page is recorded at 8.3 seconds with less than 14% of the actual Chrome users experience LCP load times of less than 2.5 seconds. This generally means the user will have to wait for a little over 8 seconds for the page to have loaded the important contents in the viewport.

Knfrmd Tips - Union Bank of Nigeria

The general assumption is that if a page takes more than 5 seconds to load, user frustration starts to sky rocket. With the Union Bank of Nigeria's website, this seems to be the case.

There are quick fixes that can be implored to fix the speed issues with the website. Using Chrome DevTools (Show Coverage), you can see what portion of the assets being loaded on the page are actually used. An asset, /sassy-social-share which is about 120kb is being loaded and 100% of it is not used by the website, there are other assets that can be optimized. Eliminating unused CSS and JS, could play a huge role in reducing both FCP and LCP.

Taking a closer look under the hood, There are several JS files at the top of the head tag, all of which will have to compile before CSS starts to render. Read more about addressing FCP issues on Knfrmd's blog, How big Is Your Head Tag to learn more about how to reduce the white screen presented to users before the content begins to render.

It's always recommended, however, not compulsory to have the head in this order; meta title link style script