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A Look at JAMstack’s Speed, By the Numbers
1.11.2019
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.
First, I’d like...
Why Are Accessible Websites so Hard to Build?
23.10.2019
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...
What I Like About Writing Styles with Svelte
23.10.2019
There’s been a lot of well-deserved hype around Svelte recently, with the project accumulating over 24,000 GitHub stars. Arguably the simplest JavaScript framework out there, Svelte was written by Rich Harris, the developer behind Rollup. There’s a lot to like about Svelte (performance, built-in...
How to Use JPEG 2000 (JP2) for a Faster Images on iPhone (Sponsored)
21.10.2019
Images Slow Down Websites Images slow down the page-loading performance of many websites. Audit tools like Google’s Lighthouse can quickly tell you how many seconds you can save by optimizing your images. When you are delivering to desktops or android devices running Chrome browser, a quick...
Workflow Considerations for Using an Image Management Service
16.10.2019
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...
Ten-Ton Widgets
15.10.2019
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 add a "email us" button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat widget...
Let’s Make a Fancy, but Uncomplicated Page Loader
15.10.2019
It’s pretty common to see a loading state on sites these days, particularly as progressive web apps and reactive sites are on the rise. It’s one way to improve "perceived" performance — that is, making it feel as though the site is loading faster than it actually is.
There’s no shortage of ways...
WordPress Plugin Overload? Give Jetpack a Try!
15.10.2019
The WordPress ecosystem has a plentiful supply of plugins that offer everything from AMP to Zapier integration and so, so, so many other things in between. It's a significant contributor to what makes WordPress great because plugins can account for the needs of nearly any website.
How many plugins...
Weekly Platform News: Impact of Third-Party Code, Passive Mixed Content, Countries with the Slowest Connections
10.10.2019
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.
Measure the impact of third-party code during page load
Lighthouse, Chrome’s built-in...
Recipes for Performance Testing Single Page Applications in WebPageTest
10.10.2019
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...
Images Are Not Static Content
10.10.2019
We constantly hear about the importance of keeping websites lean and fast. A fast-loading website makes users more satisfied, and satisfied users spend more time and money on your website. However, website optimization is a complex task, as there is not one silver bullet to fix all of the issues...
Preloading Pages Just Before They are Needed
27.9.2019
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...
Weekly Platform News: Layout Shifts, Stalled High-Bitrate Videos, Screenshots in Firefox
26.9.2019
In this week's roundup: fighting shifty layouts, some videos might be a bit stalled, and a new way to take screenshots in Firefox.
Let's get into the news!
Identifying the causes of layout shifts during page load
You can now use WebPageTest to capture any layout shifts that occur on your website...
How Web Content Can Affect Power Usage
18.9.2019
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...
5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe
16.9.2019
Scott Jehl has written this wonderful piece about how 5G is on the horizon and how it could cause problems for users. But first, he starts by talking about the overwhelming positive news about it:
[...] as it matures 5G is predicted to improve network speeds dramatically. Carriers are predicting...
“Off The Main Thread”
10.9.2019
JavaScript is what they call "single-threaded." As Brian Barbour puts it:
This means it has one call stack and one memory heap.
We all feel a symptom of that regularly in the form of performance jank and non-interactivity on elements or entire sites. If we give JavaScript lots of jobs and it gets...
Fast Software
3.9.2019
There have been some wonderfully interconnected things about fast software lately.
We talk a lot of performance on the web. We can make things a little faster here and there. We see rises in success metrics with rises in performance. I find those type of charts very satisfying. But perhaps even...
Jeremy Keith – Building the Web
23.8.2019
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...
Weekly Platform News: Improving UX on Slow Connections, a Tip for Writing Alt Text and a Polyfill for the HTML loading attribute
23.8.2019
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.
Detecting users on slow connections
Algolia is using the Network Information API (see the API’s Chrome status page) to detect users...
Using rel=”preconnect” to establish network connections early and increase performance
20.8.2019
Milica Mihajlija:
Adding rel=preconnect to 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...