Hi <<First Name>>,
Welcome to our first Speed Matters edition of 2026! If you're anything like me, January flew by and now you're raring to go for February (and beyond).
This month is a mix of big-picture thinking (both aspirational and sobering) as well as some boots-on-the-ground best practices:
- What was the state of the web in 2025?
- Digital experience benchmarks in 2026
- Looking ahead to the performance inequality gap in 2026
- The hidden cost of media on the web
- Why "stubborn empathy" is the mindset we all need to have right now
- UX/UI best practices for mobile apps
- It's more important than ever to know how to leverage tech communities for your career
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
Until next month (and next year!),
Tammy
@tammyeverts.com
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The fastest and slowest US news sites
Delivering a fast experience to your mobile users isn't easy, which is why we track mobile experiences over slow connections in our Industry Page Speed Benchmarks.*
Despite the limitation of a slow connection, it was great to see a few sites — Vox, Forbes, and USA Today – deliver Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) times under 2.5 seconds.
What these sites have in common:
- Fast backend times
- LCP element is one of the earliest resources served
- Few resources in the critical rendering path (Optimizing the critical rendering path is the key to delivering an experience that feels fast)
*Industry Benchmarks is a public-facing, interactive set of dashboards. We test and rank industry-leading websites based on how fast their pages appear to load from a user’s perspective. It's a handy tool for benchmarking your own site, as well as digging down to see how the fastest and slowest pages in the dashboards are built.
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The Performance Inequality Gap in 2026
"As long as we continue to build only for wealthy users, the dream of a web for everyone will continue to recede before our eyes, leaving a once vibrant ecosystem a ghost-town. Creating a better web starts with respecting the limits of the hardware and networks that most of the world's users carry. This is a deep dive into those constraints, their progression, and what they mean for web developers and the tool vendors that support them."
That's the thesis of this long-running series by Alex Russell. If you care about the web and the people who use it, this series is a sobering reality check. Check out the latest instalment, and browse previous instalments.
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2025 Web Almanac
Some of the stats you'll find in Alex's report are drawn from the annual Web Almanac, a state-of-the-web report based on data from the HTTP Archive. While the almanac contains some slightly grim findings about page bloat – particularly JavaScript – there's also good news. The usage of content delivery networks (CDNs) is higher than ever, and more sites are passing Core Web Vitals: 56% for desktop and 48% for mobile.
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2026 Digital Experience Benchmarks
There's a tonne of great insights to be gleaned from this Contentsquare report, gleaned from 99 billion user sessions across 6,500+ websites.
- Conversion rates for new visitors has decreased by 9%
- The increase in AI traffic means organic search has slipped 9%
- Reducing "rage clicks" measurably increases user engagement and pages per visit
- Up to 15.6% of user sessions experience frustration caused by slow load times.
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Stubborn empathy
At the performance.now() conference last October, Tim Kadlec delivered one of my favourite talks.
"One of the most important roles we play on the web is as the users line of defense, which requires that we demonstrate stubborn empathy on their behalf. Unfortunately, that concept is all too easy to fade away, particularly in the wake of two underlying threats to web performance, and the web at large—the monoculture and the machine."
Tim's talk explores the risks we face and how to counter them by remembering to always put the user first. The video isn't available yet, but you can check out his slides.
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The hidden cost of media on the web
I was so honoured to be invited to this fireside chat with Sean Davis at PixelPalooza! We covered a lot of topics, including how images, video, and audio affect site performance, user experience, and business metrics.
I created some charts to illustrate some key stats, including:
- At the 90th percentile, we're serving almost 7MB of images per page!
- The number of images on a page is a predictor of conversion (too many = bad)
- Excessive image weight hurts your Google Image Search ranking
- 10% of sites lazy load the main image (which hurts LCP time)
Learn more: Best practices for optimizing images
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UX/UI best practices for modern mobile app design
Carlos Smith has curated an excellent set of best practices – both high-level and pragmatic – for ensuring that your mobile app is as performant as your website.
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Leveraging tech communities for your career
Being part of a tech community is good for your soul and for your career. Sia Karamalegos should know – she has an exceptional gift for creating fun, supportive community wherever she goes. Sia generously shares her experience and wisdom with this very helpful set of tips, which includes super-specific resources for the performance community. (Thank you, Sia!)
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In case you missed it...
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