It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
I really enjoyed this interview with Jeremy Keith on the state of the web, how things have changed in recent years and why he’s a mix of optimistic and nervous for the future.
One thing that caught my attention during the interview more than anything was where Jeremy started discussing how folks think that websites are pretty crummy in general. This reminded me that I cannot count the number of times when someone has said to me “ah, I can’t … Read article
In this week's roundup, how to determine a slow connection, what we should put into alt text for images, and a new polyfill for the HTML loading attribute, plus more.… Read article
Adding
rel=preconnectto a<link />informs the browser that your page intends to establish a connection to another domain, and that you'd like the process to start as soon as possible. Resources will load more quickly because the setup process has already been completed by the time the browser requests them.
The graphic in the post does a good job of making this an obviously good choice for performance:… Read article
This week I’ve been brooding about web performance and accessibility. It all began when Ethan Marcotte made a lot of great notes about the accessibility issues that are common with AMP:
… Read articleIn the recordings above, I’m trying to navigate through the AMP Story. And as I do, VoiceOver describes a page that’s impossible to understand: the arrows to go back or forward are simply announced as “button”; most images are missing text equivalents, which is why the screen reader
In this week's roundup of platform news, Chrome introduces a new attribute for loading, accessibility specifications for web developers, and the BBC moves visualizations to the Shadow DOM.… Read article
Scott Jehl:
One of the most impactful things we can do to improve page performance and resilience is to load CSS in a way that does not delay page rendering. That’s because by default, browsers will load external CSS synchronously—halting all page rendering while the CSS is downloaded and parsed—both of which incur potential delays.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'"/>
In this article, we uncover how PageSpeed calculates it’s critical speed score.
It’s no secret that speed has become a crucial factor in increasing revenue and lowering abandonment rates. Now that Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, many organizations have become laser-focused on performance.
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.