Front-End Performance Checklist

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on

Vitaly Friedman swings wide with a massive list of performance considerations. It’s a well-considered mix of old tactics (cutting the mustard, progressive enhancement, etc.) and newer considerations (tree shaking, prefetching, etc.). I like the inclusion of a quick wins section since so much can be done for little effort; it’s important to do those things before getting buried in more difficult performance tasks.

Speaking of considering performance, Philip Walton recently dug into what interactive actually means, in a world where we throw around acronyms like TTI:

But what exactly does the term “interactivity” mean?

I think most people reading this article probably know what the word “interactivity” means in general. The problem is, in recent years the word has been given a technical meaning (e.g. in the metric “Time to Interactive” or TTI), and unfortunately the specifics of that meaning are rarely explained.

One reason is that the page depends on JavaScript and that JavaScript hasn’t downloaded, parsed, and run yet. That reason is well-trod, but there is another one: the “main thread” might be busy doing other stuff. That is a particularly insidious enemy of performance, so definitely read Philip’s article to understand more about that.

Also, if you’re into front-end checklists, check out David Dias’ Front-End Checklist.

Direct Link →