It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
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