When you’re driving, what information do you keep in front of you?

What’s so important that you’d put it on your dashboard?

“I need to know X, Y, and Z.”

In the car, you definitely want to know your speed, and you want to know how much gas you have left.

What else?

There’s other information you need access to (like the volume of the radio, or your AC temperature) but they’re not critical—you don’t need them at a glance, just within reach.

What about your website? What information do you need at a glance? Speed? Hm… What would be your site’s “gas” gauge?

We talk a lot about site speed—what about site fuel?

What’s the thing that keeps your site going?

As we think about what metrics matter most for web performance, the dashboard is an interesting way to frame the question: You need something to keep going, what is it? Then go from there… (You can even consider scale: Are we driving a car, or a commercial airliner? We may need a bigger dashboard!)

Once we’ve decided how to measure fuel, then we can revisit speed: speed of what? Is load time the speed that matters most, or is it speed of search, chat, payment—or is it speed at all? Is it accuracy, precision, or something else?

Building your site dashboard can be a helpful, visual exercise in determining performance metrics. (Almost like test-driven performance! Now there’s an idea…)