Hi there,

Here at SpeedCurve, it's a running joke that all our meetings inevitably turn into product/customer support meetings. That's because we're always trying to figure out ways to make our tools simpler to use – and to make your work easier.

Over the past few months, we've been focusing on how to help you:

• Extract meaningful insights from your real user monitoring – We all know that RUM data is powerful. The tricky part is homing in on the actionable stuff.
• Get the most value out of using our tools – We've been around for eight years! In that time, our synthetic and RUM tools have become much more nuanced. With that nuance comes complexity. Our goal is to help you navigate, not just our tools, but web performance as a whole.

In this edition, I'm excited to share the newest ways we're helping with both those goals. Hopefully they make your job not just easier, but (dare I hope) a bit more fun. :)

Until next time,

Tammy
@tameverts

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NEW! Support Hub

Our brand-new Support Hub is live. Eight years of building new features means eight years worth of support docs. That's a lot of docs! Earlier this year, we realized that we had well over a hundred articles in our support centre. Inevitably, some duplication had crept in and some dead wood had accumulated. So we decided to give our docs a complete overhaul.

We worked hard to structure our support docs to make them easy to scan and quickly find what you need – from our step-by-step guides to getting started with Synthetic and RUM through to troubleshooting and FAQs.

Throughout our support docs – and our website – you may notice that we now refer to our real user monitoring service as SpeedCurve RUM (formerly known as LUX). Our RUM hasn't changed. We simply wanted to make our product naming more straightforward, especially for newcomers.

NEW! Recipes

You'll find Recipes in our Support Hub, but I want to call them out separately here because they're that exciting. Recipes are detailed walkthroughs – including sample scripts – of multi-step tasks, such as:

• Simulate a user journey
• Simulate a SPA or AJAX navigation
• Submit a login form
• Add a repeat view
• Track size for a single resource

ICYMI: RUM Sessions dashboard

Last month, we released the RUM Sessions dashboard, which allows you to drill into a dataset and explore those sessions that occurred within a given span of time. Early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We're excited to see how you folks are using your Sessions dashboard to identify and debug anomalies.

NEW! Bookmark & compare RUM sessions

Within the popup in any RUM time series chart, you can click on 'View Sessions' if you want to explore that dataset right away. Or if you want to save a dataset to explore and/or compare later, click 'Bookmark Sessions'.

You may also have noticed that Bookmarks are now in your main nav, making it easier for you to refer back to all your bookmarked synthetic tests and RUM sessions. (Learn more about bookmarking and comparing data.)

Why performance matters – especially now

We talk a lot about web performance, but many of these conversations come from a purely technical perspective. Most people have a gut feeling that performance is important, but exactly what influence it has on your users and your business is often overlooked. In a recent talk at Smashing Conference's Meets for Speed, I shared why our need for fast online experiences is hard-wired, and how slow performance hurts your users and your business.

You can see my slides here, and you can watch the videos – which include talks by Addy Osmani and Robin Osborne – here.

Chrome Dev Summit 2021: Free workshops!

I'm so excited to be speaking again at this year's Chrome Dev Summit. On November 9 and 16, I'll be presenting a workshop called Web Performance 101: What is performance and why does it matter? (Follow the link to request your free invite.)

The CDS lineup is packed with great performance and accessibility workshops and learning lounges this year, from folks like Rachel Andrews, Tim Kadlec, Max Firtman, Emma Twersky, and Pat Meenan. Get your workshop invites here, and your learning lounge invites here.

From the #webperf community...

• Google SEO updates for 2021: LCP, FCP, FID, CLS, oh my! – When performance makes it to the pages of Forbes, you know it's hit the big time. This is a good article to share with your colleagues who might be less technical, and who want a quick primer about Core Web Vitals and why they matter.
• My challenge to the web performance community – Perfect Lighthouse scores ≠ great real user experiences. In one analysis, half of pages that scored 100 on Lighthouse didn’t meet recommended Core Web Vitals thresholds. This is a great post by Phil Walton about why we need to look outside the lab to measure performance.
• Fostering a web performance culture on leroymerlin.fr – The strength of your company's performance culture is one of the best indicators of success. Bertrand Laot at French retailer LeroyMerlin shares how they use a combination of RUM and synthetic monitoring – including performance budgets and alerts – to keep their entire team up to speed.
• How Swappie increased mobile revenue by 42% by focusing on Core Web Vitals – Lina Hansson shares how finding a correlation between site performance and business metrics was the key to driving the success of Swappie's optimization efforts.
• 12 essential tips to get your site and app ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – Tip 5: Conduct regular performance testing!