It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
The irony of web performance is that the average page weight of a site continues to go up year after year, despite us being more aware of the problem and having more tools at our disposal to fight it than ever.
To paraphrase Seinfeld, "we know how to fight page weight issues; we just don't use the tools we have to fight page weight issues."… Read article
Harry Roberts digs into why hosting assets on someone else’s servers (including CDNs) is not such a great idea if we want our websites to be lightning fast.
Harry writes:
… Read articleOne of the quickest wins—and one of the first things I recommend my clients do—to make websites faster can at first seem counter-intuitive: you should self-host all of your static assets, forgoing others’ CDNs/infrastructure.
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