Todd H. Gardner

CEO Request Metrics

Todd is a software engineer, business leader, and developer advocate with 20+ years of experience. He is a co-founder and CEO of TrackJS and Request Metrics, and previously a independent consultant who helped build products at Thomson Reuters, Reach Local, and LeadPages.

Todd H. Gardner
What is a 'Rage Click'?
ux

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
performance

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
product

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
performance

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
product

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 Observability Data
product

Our Super Friendly AI Sloth that Analyzes Your Observability 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 »
Expanding Our Vision: Unifying Client-Side Observability Data
product

Expanding Our Vision: Unifying Client-Side Observability Data

In 2021, we started Request Metrics as a simple and developer-friendly service to measure and improve web performance. We built an incredible platform that d... Read more »
Measuring Web Performance in 2023: The Definitive Guide
performance

Measuring Web Performance in 2023: 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: 2023 Guide
performance

High Performance Images: 2023 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
performance

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
performance

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 »
5 Tips To Make Google Fonts Faster
performance

5 Tips To Make Google Fonts Faster

Google Fonts is a fantastic tool for web designers and developers, but it is sometimes one of the slowest resources on your website. It’s frustrating and iro... Read more »
Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring
performance

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
performance

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
performance

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
performance

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
performance

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
performance

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
engineering

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)
performance

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
engineering

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 »
KCDC 2022

KCDC 2022

Held at the Kansas City Convention Center in downtown Kansas City. Each year, we draw a large audience of new and experienced Developers, Architects, UI/UX D... Read more »
NDC Oslo 2022

NDC Oslo 2022

Since its start-up in Oslo 2008, the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) quickly became one of Europe`s largest conferences for .NET & Agile development. T... Read more »
NDC Minnesota 2022

NDC Minnesota 2022

Since its start-up in Oslo 2008, the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) quickly became one of Europe`s largest conferences for .NET & Agile development. T... Read more »
That Conference Texas 2023

That Conference Texas 2023

A summer camp in the Texas winter for software geeks passionate about learning all things mobile, web, cloud, and technology. THAT Conference is unlike any o... Read more »
NDC London 2023

NDC London 2023

Since its start-up in Oslo 2008, the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) quickly became one of Europe`s largest conferences for .NET & Agile development. T... Read more »
XSS to Pwned: Fighting Magecart and Other Client-Side Attacks

XSS to Pwned: Fighting Magecart and Other Client-Side Attacks

Join us for a fireside chat with Scott Helme and Todd Gardner, experts in Cyber Security and Client-side Observability. We’ll delve into the ever-present thr... Read more »
Twin Cities Code Camp 24

Twin Cities Code Camp 24

Code Camp is Minnesota's free developer event by devs and for devs. Watch talks. Learn new stuff. Have fun. Become better at your craft. The Request Metrics ... Read more »
Minnebar

Minnebar

First held in 2006, Minnebar is the nation’s largest and longest-running technology unconference. Like other unconferences (or BarCamps), Minnebar is a user-... Read more »
Connectaha

Connectaha

Connectaha is a conference that aims to bring everyone in software development together to learn from one another. We believe better solutions are created wh... Read more »
Stir Trek

Stir Trek

Stir Trek is a one-day conference focused on teaching software developers, and others in the industry, the latest and greatest in technologies, techniques, a... Read more »
Open Source North

Open Source North

Since 2015, OSN has been bringing the open source, enterprise community together to learn, share, and connect. Read more »
KCDC 2023

KCDC 2023

Held at the Kansas City Convention Center in downtown Kansas City. Each year, we draw a large audience of new and experienced Developers, Architects, UI/UX D... Read more »
API Testing and Observability

API Testing and Observability

Dive into the world of API Testing and Observability with industry experts Gil Zilberfeld and Todd Gardner. In this interactive webinar, we'll delve into the... Read more »