Todd H. Gardner

Unified Web Performance: Real User Monitoring and Automatic Lab Testing

At Request Metrics, we’re always looking for ways to help you make your websites faster and your users happier. Today, we’re excited to announce a major new ... Read more »

Fixing Long Animation Frames (LoAF)

Long animation frames (LoAFs) make your website feel slow and laggy, but we’re here to help you fix that. Learn how to track, analyze, and optimize your LoAF... Read more »

Request Metrics and Perforator - Combining RUM and Load Testing

Your website’s performance can make or break your business. Slow load times, crashes under pressure, and a poor user experience can cost you customers, reduc... Read more »

What are Long Animation Frames (LoAF)

Long animation frames (LoAFs) can leave your website feeling slow and unresponsive. Learn about Long Animation Frames, what they are, and how to measure them. Read more »

The Chrome UX Report: Why Real Data Matters

Everyone in web performance talks about CrUX—what the heck is it?! CrUX, or the Chrome User Experience Report, is Google’s initiative to measure how websites... Read more »

5 Tips To Make Google Fonts Faster

Google Fonts is the defacto way many developers add custom fonts to the web. But it is often one of the slowest resources on your website. It’s frustrating a... Read more »

Launching Resource Performance Monitoring

What is the slowest part of your website? Most of the time, it’s the resources: all the CSS, fonts, images, and JavaScript that powers your webpage. Resource... Read more »

Trying and failing and trying again

Starting software products is hard, and it’s easy to make mistakes. We’ve started a lot of products – and we’ve made a whole lot of mistakes along the way. B... Read more »

Frontend vs Backend Performance: Which is Slower?

Kent C Dodds made a claim on Twitter (X) that the “biggest performance problems are probably backend, not frontend related.” Is this true? Some websites have... Read more »

What is a 'Rage Click'?

You know that thing where you are so angry at a broken website that you furiously click that button until it does what you want? Yea, we all do that. It’s ca... Read more »

What Is Time to Interactive? A Comprehensive Guide

Website performance is critical to understand user experience and engagement, but there are so many different metrics! What do they all mean? Not to worry, d... Read more »

Announcing Custom Metadata Reports & Filters

We just released support for custom metadata in Request Metrics! Metadata allows you to describe your user, session, application, environment, account, A/B T... Read more »

Debugging a Slow Core Web Vital Score

A Request Metrics customer asked for some help troubleshooting poor scores on their Core Web Vitals, specifically the Largest Contentful Paint. I did a deep ... Read more »

Google Analytics 4 Has Me So Frustrated, We Built Our Own Analytics Service

Google Analytics was the go-to analytics tool. It set the standard, we all learned on it, and we all used it. But Google Analytics 4? It’s a nightmare. I’ve ... Read more »

Our Super Friendly AI Sloth that Analyzes Your Performance Data

Seems like everyone is building a ChatGPT thing right now, doesn’t it? Well we are too! Inspired by so many others, we decided to see what AI could do with o... Read more »

Measuring Web Performance in 2024: The Definitive Guide

This is the complete guide to the metrics, methods, and measurements of web performance in 2023. If you run a website, this guide has all the fundamental i... Read more »

High Performance Images: 2025 Guide

Images engage users, drive clicks, and generally make everything better–except performance. Images are giant blobs of bytes that are usually the slowest par... Read more »

Explaining Performance to Non-Technical Stakeholders

Whether you’re an e-commerce company, a SaaS provider, or a content publisher, understanding the performance of your website is important to everyone on the ... Read more »

How To Read Flame Charts and Percentiles

Charting can be complicated and intimidating, especially when dealing with web performance data, flame charts, and percentiles. There is so much data crammed... Read more »

Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring

Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring are the most important tools in your performance toolbox. But they do different things and are useful at different... Read more »

Fix Your First Contentful Paint (FCP): Cheat Sheet

Are slow FCP scores getting you down? Worried that website performance is frustrating your users and hurting your SEO rankings? This FCP cheat sheet has all... Read more »

Tutorial: Monitoring Your Core Web Vitals

Web performance used to be easy. You’d time how long a page takes to load, easy. But the rise of client-side JavaScript has introduced bold new ways for web... Read more »

How Hacker News Crushed DavidWalshBlog

Earlier this month, David’s heartfelt posting about leaving Mozilla made the front page of Hacker News. Traffic increased by 800% to his already-busy website... Read more »

The Limitations of Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse helps you identify page performance issues. It generates an overall performance “score” to make you feel good (or bad) about your site’s sp... Read more »

Vital Web Performance

I hate slow websites. They are annoying to use and frustrating to work on. But what does it mean to be “slow”? It used to be waiting for document load. Then ... Read more »

Privacy and Ethical Web Analytics

Web analytics is often based on invasively collecting and aggregating user data. But web analytics doesn’t have to be an invasion of privacy. A growing movem... Read more »

Measuring Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a measurement of how long the largest element on the page takes to render. It’s one of several Web Vital metrics that measu... Read more »

Using the Beacon API

We need to capture performance data as the user is leaving the page. The Beacon gives us a reliable way to do that. Users are so annoying! There they go, lea... Read more »