Who has the fastest website in F1?

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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:

Trying 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 a high-end phone. To get a feel for how a site performs for real users, you have to look at mid-to-lower-end Android devices, which is why I picked the Moto G4.

This reminds me of Tim Kadlec’s post earlier in the year about the ethics of performance:

Poor performance can, and does, lead to exclusion. This point is extremely well documented by now, but warrants repeating. Sites that use an excess of resources, whether on the network or on the device, don’t just cause slow experiences, but can leave entire groups of people out.

Anyway, back to Jake’s post about Formula One websites. I love that Jake writes in such a way that his points aren’t insulting to those who work on these sites, but hones in on what we can learn about the myriad issues that lead to bad web performance. Subsequently, Jake provides us all with a ton of useful ideas for fixing performance issues like annoying layout changes, scripts that block rendering, unused CSS issues that also block rendering, and loading states.

Oh, and this reminds me that Chris noted a while back that the loading experience for most websites can be vastly improved:

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