Getting Started with Web Performance
Learn about performance on the web with tutorials on the concepts, tools, and tactics to make your site faster.

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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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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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 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 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 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 JavaScr...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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About Request Metrics
The easiest way to monitor your web performance. Request Metrics records how real users experience your website and shows you simplified metrics and alerting. And at a price that's easy on your budget.