Getting Started with Web Performance
Learn about performance on the web with tutorials on the concepts, tools, and tactics to make your site faster.
Measuring Web Performance in 2022: The Definitive Guide
This is the complete guide to the metrics, methods, and measurements of web performance in 2022.
If you run a website, this guide has all the fundamental ideas you need to understand to build a fast website for your users, and for search engines.
Contents
Chapter 1
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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 times and many developers only spend time mastering one of these tools and only see a part of their performance problems, like trying to h...
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HTTP/3 is Fast
HTTP/3 is here, and it’s a big deal for web performance. See just how much faster it makes websites!
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Measuring Largest Contentful Paint
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 measure how real users perceive the performance of modern web applications. New measurements like Largest Contentful Paint are increasingly impor...
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Measuring Cumulative Layout Shift
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), sometimes known as jank, is a measurement of how much elements move due to late-rendered content. You can think of it as a measurement of layout instability. It has become a common problem for many websites due to third-party scripts and tag management and its one o...
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Measuring First Input Delay
First Input Delay (FID) measures how long the browser took to respond to the first user input event. It’s one of several Core Web Vital metrics that measure how real users perceive the performance of modern web applications. New measurements like First Input Delay are increasingly important as Ja...
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Web Performance Profiling: Google.com
How is Google so fast? It’s so fast we take it for granted. It feels instant from the time you search to when results are displayed. What can we learn about the techniques they use to make their site so fast?
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Fix Your First Contentful Paint: 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 the tactics (with links) you’ll need to have screaming-fast FCP scores.
First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a measurement of how long it takes...
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High Performance Images: 2022 Guide
Images engage users, drive clicks, and generally make everything better–except performance. Images are giant blobs of bytes that are usually the slowest part of your website. This 2022 guide has everything you need to know for fast images on the web.
Images are big. Really big. The bytes requ...
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Advertising's Performance Tradeoffs
Advertising is everywhere on the web and users have noticed. More than 40% of internet users block ads. Are these users sticking it to the man or just tired of slow site performance? To find out, we measure advertising’s performance impact on a few popular sites.
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Using First Contentful Paint - FCP
First Contentful Paint, or FCP, measures the time take to render the first element of a webpage. It’s a modern, user-centric measurement of how fast users see a response from your website. Here’s everything you need to know about the metric and how to use it.
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Using HTTP Caching: 2022 Guide
The fastest website is the website that is already loaded, and that’s exactly what we can do with HTTP caching. HTTP caching lets web browsers reuse of previously loaded resources, like pages, images, JavaScript, and CSS. It’s a powerful tool to improve your web performance, but misconfiguration ...
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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 speed. This score can be useful, but has some limitations.
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Web Performance Profiling: Instacart.com
Grocery shopping is tedious and time consuming. In search of a more streamlined experience, I decided to try Instacart. Unfortunately, using their site is also tedious and time consuming.
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Web Performance Profiling: Nike.com
Google has long used website performance as a ranking criteria for search results. Despite the importance of page experience for SEO, many sites still suffer unacceptable load times. Poor performance is often a confluence of factors: slow time to first byte, hundreds of resource requests, and w...
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Fastest News: Best Performing News Website
News teams often compete to break the story first. We think they should also compete on being the first to load their website. Let’s apply our web performance skills to a real world example: which news website has the best performance?
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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 movement of businesses, including performance monitoring services like Request Metrics, are working to create sustainable web analytics tools. To...
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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 waiting for page ready. But with so many asynchronous patterns in use today, how do we even define what “slow” is?
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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, which slowed and eventually failed under the pressure. Request Metrics monitors performance and uptime for David’s blog, and our metrics t...
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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 websites to be frustratingly slow. Measuring this new slowness will take new metrics. Google calls them the Core Web Vitals.
Each of the Core ...
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About Request Metrics
The easiest way to monitor your web performance. Request Metrics shows how real users experience your website and with fast and simple reports. And at a price that's easy on your budget.