It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Here’s a wonderful reminder from Stephanie Stimac about web performance. She writes about a recent experience of moving to an area with an unreliable network and how this caused problems for her as she tried to figure out what was happening during a power blackout:
… Read articleAssuming all of your customers are living the same life, with the same privilege, with the same access to fast internet and data is the quickest way to ensure you’re excluding some of them and
People say JAMstack sites are fast — let’s find out why by looking at real performance metrics! We’ll cover common metrics, like Time to First Byte (TTFB) among others, then compare data across a wide section of sites to see how different ways to slice those sites up compare.… Read article
I was chatting with some front-end folks the other day about why so many companies struggle at making accessible websites. Why are accessible websites so hard to build? We learn about HTML, we make sure things are semantic and — voila! @— we have an accessible website. During the course of conversation, someone mentioned the Domino's pizza legal case, which is perhaps the most public example of a company being sued because of a lack of accessibility.
Here’s an … Read article
There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.
That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them and doing all the things we could to lower the performance hit from them. So you use some service to help you deliver images better. Smart. Many of them will make managing and optimizing images a lot easier. But I don't consider them a no-brainer. There is a lot to think about, like making choices that don't paint you into a corner.
At a recent conference talk (sorry, I forget which one), there was a quick example of poor web performance in the form of a third-party widget. The example showed a site that installed the widget in order to add a "email us" button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat widget — just an email thing. It weighed in at something like 470KB, which is straight bananas.
Just in case you are someone who feels … Read article
In this week's roundup, Lighthouse sheds light on third-party scripts, insecure resources will get blocked on secure sites, and many country connection speeds are still trying to catch up to others... literally.
Lighthouse, Chrome’s built-in auditing tool, now shows a warning when the impact of third-party code on page load performance is too high. The pre-existing “Third-party usage” diagnostic audit will now fail if the total main-thread blocking time caused by … Read article
WebPageTest is an online tool and an Open Source project to help developers audit the performance of their websites. As a Web Performance Evangelist at Theodo, I use it every single day. I am constantly amazed at what it offers to the web development community at large and the web performance folks particularly — for free.
But things can get difficult pretty quickly when dealing with Single Page Applications — usually written with React, Vue, Svelte or any other … Read article
The typical journey for a person browsing a website: view a page, click a link, browser loads new page. That's assuming no funny business like a Single Page App, which still follows that journey, but the browser doesn't load a new page — the client fakes it for the sake of a snappier transition.
What if you could load that new page before the person clicks the link so that, when they do, the loading of that next page is … Read article
In this week's roundup: fighting shifty layouts, some videos might be a bit stalled, and a new way to take screenshots in Firefox.… Read article
Because we know that all people with battery-powered devices are constantly concerned about their battery levels, and that websites are significant consumers of that battery power, we should probably think about this stuff a lot more than we do.
I'd expect the browser itself to be our main ally here, doing smart things to reduce power consumption without us developers needing to think too much about it. But we've learned over the years that it's always a shared responsibility. We … Read article