Continuing our series of Performance Heroes, this month we celebrate Estela Franco! Estela is a passionate web performance and technical SEO specialist with more than ten years of contributing to our community. She loves to talk and share about web performance optimization, technical SEO, JavaScript, and Jamstack whenever she can.
Now it's even easier to find and fix Interaction to Next Paint issues and improve your Core Web Vitals.
Our newest release continues our theme of making your RUM data even more actionable. In addition to advanced settings, navigation types, and page attributes, we've just released more diagnostic detail for the latest flavor in Core Web Vitals: Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
This post covers:
Celebrating performance wins is critical to a healthy, well-supported, high-performing team. This isn't a new idea. In fact, it's something that started in the early days of web performance when Lara Hogan, who was an engineering manager at Etsy at the time, discussed the practice of empowering people across the organization by celebrating 'performance heroes'.
In that spirit, we're reigniting the tradition of spotlighting Performance Heroes from our awesome community. It seems appropriate that we'd start with someone who is currently focused on keeping Etsy's site as fast as possible: Paul Calvano
Not only has Paul had a long career dedicated to making the web faster for some of the largest and most popular sites in the world, he is humble, incredibly talented, and one of the kindest people you'll ever meet.
Cookie consent popups and banners are everywhere, and they're silently hurting the speed of your pages. Learn the most common problems – and their workarounds – with measuring performance with content manager platforms in place.
I've been spending a lot of time looking at the performance of European sites lately, and have found that the consent management platforms (CMPs) consistently create a false reality for folks when trying to understand performance using synthetic monitoring. Admittedly, this is not a new topic, but I feel it's important enough that it warrants another PSA.
In this post, I will cover some of the issues related to measuring performance with CMPs in place and provide some resources for scripting around consent popups in SpeedCurve.
It's easier to make a fast website than it is to keep a website fast. If you've invested countless hours in speeding up your site, but you're not using performance budgets to prevent regressions, you could be at risk of wasting all your efforts.
In this post we'll cover how to:
This bottom of this post also contains a collection of case studies from companies that are using performance budgets to stay fast.
Let's get started!
I was inspired by Tim Vereecke's excellent talk on noise-cancelling RUM at PerfNow this past November. In this talk, he highlighted a lot of the 'noise' that comes along with capturing RUM data. Tim's approach was to filter out the noise introduced by really fast response times that can be caused by leveraging the browser cache, prerendering, and other performance optimization techniques.
I thought Tim's focus on 'human viewable navigations' was a great approach to use when looking at how to improve user experience. But there also may be times when you want to understand and embrace the noise. Sometimes there are opportunities in the signals that we often forget are there.
In this post, I'll demonstrate how you can use SpeedCurve RUM to identify all types of navigations, their performance impact, and potential opportunities for delivering lightning-fast page speed to your users.
We'll cover things like:
After years of development and testing, Google has added Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to its trifecta of Core Web Vitals – the performance metrics that are a key ingredient in its search ranking algorithm. INP replaces First Input Delay (FID) as the Vitals responsiveness metric.
Not sure what INP means or why it matters? No worries – that's what this post is for. :)
And at the bottom of this post, we'll wrap thing up with some inspiring case studies from companies that have found that improving INP has improved sales, pageviews, and bounce rate.
Let's dive in!
The hardest part about web performance isn’t making your site faster – it’s keeping it that fast. Hearing about a company that devoted significant effort into optimizing their site, only to find their performance right back where it started a few months later, is all too familiar.
The reality is that, as critical as site speed is, it’s also very easy to overlook. It doesn’t jump out like a blurry image or a layout issue. And the majority of modern tools and frameworks that are used to build sites today make it all too easy to compound the issue.
Making performance more visible throughout the development process is one of the most critical things a company can do.
I like to think of it as setting up guardrails and breadcrumbs.
Guardrails and breadcrumbs need to work together. Setting up guardrails without the ability to dive in more will lead to frustration. Having proper breadcrumbs without guardrails in place all but assures we will constantly be fighting regressions after they’ve already wreaked havoc on our sites and our users.
Let’s take a look at both of these concepts and how they should work together.
Image by Freepik
On-demand testing has sparked a lot of discussion here at SpeedCurve over the past year. You've always had the ability to manually trigger a round of tests – based on the scheduled tests in your settings – using the 'Test Now' button. But there hasn't been a lot of flexibility to support nuanced use cases, such as...
"I just deployed changes to my site and want to check for any regressions."
"I saw a change to my RUM data and I want to see if I can replicate it with synthetic for further diagnostics."
"I have a paused site that I don't want to test regularly, but would like to test from time to time."
"Please just let me test any URL I want without setting up a site and scheduling testing."
"I need to quickly debug this script without kicking off tests for my entire site."
"I would like to get a first look at a page in order to troubleshoot regressions I saw in RUM."
Based on your feedback, we've just launched new capabilities for on-demand testing. We're pretty excited about these, and we hope you will be, too!
In this post, we'll:
Let's goooooooo!
Not surprisingly, most of the conversations I've had with SpeedCurve users over the last few months have focused on improving INP.
INP measures how responsive a page is to visitor interactions. It measures the elapsed time between a tap, a click, or a keypress and the browser next painting to the screen.
INP breaks down into three sub-parts
Pages can have multiple interactions, so the INP time you'll see reported by RUM products and other tools, such as Google Search Console and Chrome's UX Report (CrUX), will generally be the worst/highest INP time at the 75th percentile.
Like all Core Web Vitals, INP has a set of thresholds:
INP thresholds for Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor
Many sites tend to be in the Needs Improvement or Poor categories. My experience over the last few months is that getting to Good is achievable, but it's not always easy.
In this post I'm going to walk through: