Hi <<First Name>>,
Welcome to the May edition of Speed Matters! Lots of great stuff this month, including:
- The fastest and slowest travel sites in the EU and UK
- What you need to know about CrUX vs RUM
- How well do you know common performance metrics?
- INP fixes from real-world case studies
- Using data to make performance allies throughout your organization
- Using critical CSS to speed up your pages
- Our latest performance hero: Alex Russell!
What's on your mind lately when it comes to performance and usability? Hit reply and let me know!
Until next month,
Tammy
b: @tammyeverts.com
m: @tammy
|
|
|
Trivago leads the Page Speed Benchmarks for EU/UK travel sites
It's that time of year, when many of us are making summer travel plans. I took a look at our EU/UK Travel Benchmarks, which tracks the home pages of industry-leading travel sites, including Trivago, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Skyscanner, Priceline, and more.
I was happy to see that our friends at Trivago delivered a Largest Contentful Paint time (on a 'slow' mobile connection) of 2.04 seconds – which is within Google's threshold of 2.5 seconds. Well done!
For several of the sites, the LCP time was recorded when the largest visual element had not yet rendered. This highlights a known difficulty with tracking the LCP element in mobile browsers, and it's something you should be aware of and investigate before trusting your LCP numbers for mobile.
In many cases, sites struggled with issues like:
- Slow blocking JavaScript and CSS
- Poorly performing custom fonts
- Excessive JS before the LCP element
Wondering how to improve LCP times for your pages? Here's everything you need to know to start measuring, debugging, and optimizing LCP.
|
|
|
Experimenting with web performance
Are your page speed optimizations making an impact? That's the question Alex Hamer shows you how to answer in this post. Want to be confident that your page speed optimizations are actually making a difference to your business? Then you need A/B tests!
(FYI, A/B testing is built into SpeedCurve synthetic and RUM!)
|
|
|
Making allies with web performance
Web performance data is often a proxy for critical business metrics. Using data to tell a story that is meaningful and relevant to business stakeholders can help form alliances and increase advocacy for web performance work throughout an organization.
In this talk via Performance Observer, Ethan Gardner explains how to frame the engineering data in terms of competitive advantage, revenue impact, and user experience to help make performance optimization a strategic priority.
|
|
|
How to connect the dots between site speed and business metrics
Ever struggled to get business folks in your org to care about site speed? This post is for you. Learn how to use correlation charts to:
- Connect web performance with business metrics (bounce rate, conversions)
- Validate performance metrics
- Spot performance-blocking trends (like blocking scripts, image size, and other page variables)
|
|
|
Why you need to know your site's performance plateau (and how to find it)
Say you've done all the right things. You've lazy-loaded and compressed and minified. Your critical rendering path is a thing of beauty. You've even seen improvements to metrics like Start Render or LCP or INP. But your bounce rate didn't improve. Neither did your conversion rate, or any other business or engagement metric you care about. WHY???
The answer might lie on the performance plateau. Here's how to use correlation charts (as described above) to identify and improve the performance plateau for your site.
|
|
|
How well do you know common web performance metrics?
For example, did you know...
- INP is only available in RUM and is not supported in Safari?
- LCP is not reliable in SPAs?
- User Timing is available across all browsers?
Test your knowledge.
|
|
|
RUM vs CrUX: What you need to know
The Chrome User Experience Report (also known as the Chrome UX Report, or CrUX for short) is a dataset that reflects how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web. It's a helpful dataset, but is it the same as real user monitoring? I hear this question a lot! This short article breaks down the differences.
|
|
|
Using critical CSS for faster rendering
Users will abandon your page if it appears empty and inactive for more than 3 seconds. If they see content rendering or the skeleton of a page loading, you'll buy more time and patience. Using these techniques, you can take control of the browser's rendering process and craft a loading experience that will keep people happier and more engaged.
|
|
|
INP fixes from real-world cases
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is one of Google's Core Web Vitals, which focuses on measuring a page's responsiveness to user interaction. In this presentation via Performance Observer, Andrea Verlicchi demonstrates practical techniques for improving slow interactions through real-world case studies of debugging and optimizing poor INP.
|
|
|
Performance Hero: Alex Russell!
Continuing our series of Performance Heroes, our latest hero is Alex Russell! Alex is passionate, provocative, and unapologetically honest. While he's a true champion for web performance, his impact can be measured more broadly across the web.
Alex's passion for the web platform – and making it accessible for all – carries through in his writing, his talks, and fortunately for us, his interviews! Here's Alex's conversation with Cliff Crocker.
|
|
|
Find me at WebExpo!
I'm so excited to be speaking at WebExpo in Prague on May 29th. Among other things, I'll be demonstrating how (and why) to gather real user data, know how fast YOU need to be, create a better user experience, and improve the business metrics that matter to you – from bounce rate to conversions. Use the promo code TAMMY25 to get a 15% discount on your pass!
|
|
|
|
