Hi <<First Name>>,
This newsletter is about to hit a major milestone: 20,000 subscribers! Wow!
If you're new — or if you've been a subscriber for a while — thank you. There are so many newsletters out there competing for our time and attention these days. I'm so honoured that you chose to receive this one, and I'll always do my best to make it a worthwhile addition to your inbox.
As wonderful as it is to visit your inbox, it would be even more wonderful to visit in person! If you're planning to attend the performance.now() conference in Amsterdam on October 30-31, I'd love to see you there! I'll be delivering the day 1 keynote, followed by two days of fabulous world-class speakers, whose beautiful faces you can see below. (Use the code PN25-SPECUR to get a 20% discount.)
If you have any questions or feedback about anything you read in this edition, I'd love to hear from you.
Until next month,
Tammy
@tammyeverts.com
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Fast: A manifesto (of sorts)
"Fast eliminates cognitive friction. Raycast surfacing the right application before you finish typing feels like an extension of your mind. Superhuman's sub-100ms rule — plus their focus on keyboard shortcuts— changed the email game in a way that no one's been able to replicate, let alone beat... No one praises these tools explicitly for their speed. They just feel magical."
This is just one snippet among many I could've pulled from this powerful piece by Catherine Jue. If you only read one article in this newsletter, make it this one.
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JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
"Once upon a time, we had a fast, stable, resilient web. But we replaced it with a JavaScript cargo cult. Now it takes four engineers, three frameworks, and a CI/CD pipeline just to change a heading. It’s inordinately complex to simply publish a webpage. This isn’t evolution. It’s self-inflicted complexity."
It didn't have to be this way. Jono Alderson breaks down how we got here, and how we just might be able to get back on track and build websites that serve both developers and users.
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Are your retail landing pages killing conversions?
Retail campaigns are expensive. Between Google ads, print ads, and other promotions, it costs a lot of money to get people to visit your specially created landing page. So then why are so many campaign landing pages dangerously slow? (Hint: Jono's piece above contains some of the answer.)
In this analysis, I tracked the rendering times of campaign landing pages for a number of well-known retailers to see how they compare — who's fast, who's slow, and what's causing their page speed bottlenecks.
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The fastest Shopify themes in 2025
If you have a Shopify storefront and you read my retail landing page analysis above (and if you're now justifiably concerned about your own site!) this post is for you. Web performance consultant and Shopify expert Sia Karamalegos recently compiled a list of the fastest Shopify themes ranked by real user performance metrics.
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You no longer need JavaScript
Now that Lyra Rebane has your attention with that tongue-in-cheek title, here's what you can expect in this truly epic, information-packed post:
"I’m not trying to make you give up JavaScript, I’m just trying to show you everything that’s possible, leaving it up to you to pick what works best for whatever you’re working on. I think there’s a lot most web developers don’t know about CSS. And I think JS is often used where better alternatives exist. So, let me show you what’s out there."
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Low- and mid-tier mobile for the real world
As Harry Roberts says:
"The web is used by billions of people, but not all devices are created equal. If we’re serious about building a fast, accessible web, we need to calibrate our benchmarks against hardware that people actually own and not just the flagships we keep in our pockets and the presets that DevTools hands over. Having just one real device in your arsenal is a great place to start..."
Harry goes on to recommend the real mobile devices you should be testing on in 2025.
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How do Long Animation Frames affect user behavior?
Measuring Long Animation Frames (AKA LoAFs) gives us exciting new capabilities for pinpointing and fixing performance pains caused by (you guessed it) JavaScript. But what's the point of a performance metric that doesn't align with user behavior – and ultimately business outcomes?
Looking at four different retail sites, Cliff Crocker compared LoAF metrics for desktop and mobile and correlated them to conversion rate. He saw some surprising trends alongside some expected patterns.
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In case you missed it...
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