It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Today's websites are packed with heavy media assets like images and videos. Images make up around 50% of an average website's traffic. Many of them, however, are never shown to a user because they're placed way below the fold.
What’s this thing about images being lazy, you ask? Lazy-loading is something that’s been covered quite a bit here on CSS-Tricks, including a thorough guide with documentation for different approaches using JavaScript. In short, we’re talking about a … Read article
Ivan Akulov has collected a whole bunch of information and know-how on making things load a bit more quickly with preload and prefetch. That's great in and of itself, but he also points to something new to me – the as attribute:
<link rel="preload" href="/style.css" as="style" />Supposedly, this helps browsers prioritize when to download assets and which assets to load.
My favorite part of this post is Ivan’s quick summary at the end which clearly defines what all … Read article
Fonts are vector. Vector art with more points makes for larger files than vector art with fewer points. Custom fonts are downloaded. So, fonts with less points in their vector art are smaller. That's the theory anyway. Shall we see if there is any merit to it?… Read article
IntersectionObserver has made lazy loading a lot easier and more efficient than it used to be, but to do it really right you still gotta remove the src and such, which is cumbersome. It's definitely not as easy as:
<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />Jake Archibald looks at the websites of Formula One race teams and rates their performance, carefully examining their images and digging into the waterfall of assets for each site:
… Read articleTrying to use a site while on poor connectivity is massively frustrating, so anything sites can do to make it less of a problem is a huge win.
In terms of the device, if you look outside the tech bubble, a lot of users can't or don't want to pay for
The Chrome team announced a new feature called Lite Pages that can be activated by flipping on the Data Saver option on an Android device:
… Read articleChrome on Android’s Data Saver feature helps by automatically optimizing web pages to make them load faster. When users are facing network or data constraints, Data Saver may reduce data use by up to 90% and load pages two times faster, and by making pages load faster, a larger fraction of pages actually finish loading
The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:
img {
max-width: 100%;
height auto; /* default */
}Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end developer devices (like mine with 16GB RAM), few or no performance problems occur. But on low-end devices? It’s another story.… Read article
In a bid to have web applications serve needs for different types of users, it’s likely that more code is required than it would be for one type of user so the app can handle and adapt to different scenarios and use cases, which lead to new features and functionalities. When this happens, it’s reasonable to expect the performance of an app to dwindle as the codebase grows.
Code splitting is a technique where an application only loads the code … Read article
I've definitely been guilty of thinking about rendering on the web as a two-horse race. There is Server-Side Rendering (SSR, like this WordPress site is doing) and Client-Side Rendering (CSR, like a typical React app). Both are full of advantages and disadvantages. But, of course, the conversation is more nuanced. Just because an app is SSR doesn't mean it doesn't do dynamic JavaScript-powered things. And just because an app is CSR doesn't mean it can't leverage any SSR at all. … Read article