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Hi there,
I've really enjoyed the gradual post-holiday, back-to-work ramp up that's characterized this January for me. Like many of you, I'm sure, I've been using this time to think about my goals for the year and the path to reaching them. (One of my goals is to attend in-person events again. Fingers crossed!)
Here at SpeedCurve, we've been reflecting on everything we did in 2021 and having a good think about what we want to achieve in 2022. The most important question we ask ourselves regularly is "Does this bring happiness?" It's our litmus test for everything we do – from design to features to processes – and I believe it's the secret of our success.
For now, keep reading for some of the latest things that have brought us happiness. :)
Until next time,
Tammy
@tameverts
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NEW! RUM Live & Page Views dashboards
Your RUM Live and Page Views dashboards let you quickly answer questions like:
- How are users experiencing my site right now?
- How happy are they?
- What regions/browsers/pages are having issues?
- How are my Core Web Vitals?
(Your RUM Live dashboard would be a great candidate for sharing on a wall monitor. Just saying...)
How to read a RUM histogram
Being able to interpret a RUM histogram is an essential web performance skill. Our newest Web Performance 101 article explains:
- 50th/75th/95th percentiles
- What makes charts "lumpy"
- Why data can be sparse or have little variation
- How to create correlation charts that show the relationship between performance and your user engagement and business metrics
Web Performance 101
Want to expand (or refresh) your performance knowledge? Our Web Performance 101 resources cover topics such as:
New Core Web Vitals on the horizon?
At Chrome Dev Summit in November, there was a lot of talk about two potential new candidates for Google's Core Web Vitals. It's too early to say if or when they might be added, but if you're curious, you can read more:
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Responsiveness – The goal of this metric is to measure end-to-end latency and the overall responsiveness of a page throughout its entire rendering.
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Smoothness – This metric applies to animation, so it may not be relevant to you, but it's still an interesting proposal.
Time to update your metrics?
There's a lot of talk about which performance metrics to track, but very little talk about which ones not to track. Here's a quick cheat sheet of metrics you might want to consider deprecating and upgrading:
Learn more about the rationale for these recommendations here.
From the #webperf community...
So much great stuff has come out of our community lately, from case studies to practical how-tos:
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Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study – Barry Pollard shares how the Smashing site went from amber to green in six months. This is a very detailed case study that contains a huge number of helpful practices. Definitely worth investing the time to read! (You should also check out Barry's companion piece about fixing Cumulative Layout Shift issues.)
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Creating Airbnb's page performance score – Andrew Scheuermann explains how Airbnb created their own Page Performance Score, a 0–100 score that measures multiple performance metrics from real users on any platform
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Measuring web performance at Airbnb – Further to the above, Josh Nelson shares which web performance metrics Airbnb tracks (including Core Web Vitals) and why, how they measure them, and – importantly – how they consider tradeoffs between them in practice.
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How QuintoAndar increased conversion rates and pages per session by improving page performance – Daniela Sayuri Yassuda shares how a project that focused on optimizing Core Web Vitals and migrating to Next.js resulted in a 5% increase in conversion rates, an 87% increase in pages per session, and a 46% reduction in bounce rate.
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2021 Web Performance Calendar – There's SO MUCH great stuff in the latest Web Performance Calendar, compiled and presented by Stoyan Stefanov. I don't have space to list every article, so here are just a few of my favourites...
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Explain like I'm five: Web performance optimization – I'd love to see more content like this in our community. As performance issues speak to an increasingly broad audience, it's important to keep in mind how many newcomers are entering our space. In this post, Stoyan "summarizes the art and craft of web performance optimization for the uninitiated".
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Using diagnostic metrics – Chances are, you've wondered why Google's Core Web Vitals focuses on only three metrics, and how they landed on those metrics. Annie Sullivan explains, alongside a breakdown the crucial differences between user experience and diagnostic metrics.
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A unified theory of web performance – I love it when people take big swings when they talk about performance, and this post by Alex Russell doesn't disappoint. He explains what we do, why we do it, and how we do it.
One last thing...
This made our day. (Note: We do not know the genius behind this.) Thanks to Steven Sinatra for sharing!
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