In this article, we’ll highlight how modern image formats (AVIF or WebP) can improve compression by up to 50% and deliver better quality per-byte while still looking visually appealing. We’ll compare what’s possible at high-quality, low-quality and file-size targets.
Read more…
Websites, unfortunately, aren’t as environmentally friendly as we might like them to be. This article contains some thoughts and experiences from trying to clean them up.
Read more…
Getting a good performance score from Google is hard for any website — but doing so for an online store is even harder. We achieved green scores — even several for mobile. Here is how we did it.
Read more…
Google’s “Page Experience Update” will start rolling out in June. At first, sites that meet Core Web Vitals thresholds will have a minor ranking advantage in mobile search for all browsers. Search is important to any business, and this is the story of how Beau Hartshorne and his team at Instant Domain Search improved their Core Web Vitals scores. Plus, an open-source tool they’ve built along the way.
Read more…
Since its early days, JavaScript programs have grown in complexity and the number of tasks they perform. The need to compartmentalize such tasks into closed scopes of execution became apparent. “Tree-shaking” is a must-have performance optimization when bundling JavaScript. In this article, we dive deeper on how exactly it works and how specs and practice intertwine to make bundles leaner and more performant. Plus, you’ll get a tree-shaking checklist to use for your projects.
Read more…
How are Core Web Vitals measured? How do you know your fixes have had the desired effect and when will you see the results in Google Search Console? Let’s figure it out! In this post, Barry Pollard is going to attempt to explain a bit more about what’s going on here and explain some of the nuances and misunderstandings of these tools.
Read more…
Adding video to your application can increase customer engagement and satisfaction. But the exact opposite can occur when there are issues with the video playback: video stalls are frustrating and drive customers away. In this article, Doug Sillars will walk you through the steps to optimize the video on your website to ensure fast playback and reduce stalls.
Read more…
In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Hopefully, this little case-study will be useful to you, and perhaps there are one or two techniques that you might be able to apply to your project right away. In the end, performance is all about a sum of all the fine little details, that, when added up, make or break your customer’s experience.
Read more…
Thanks to some recent changes in browsers, it’s now well worth setting width and height attributes on your images to prevent layout shifts and improve the experience of your site visitors. Barry Polland loves improvements that just work without any effort required of website owners. That is not to ignore the hard work required by the browser developers and standardization teams, of course, but it’s often rolling out to websites that is the real difficulty. The less friction we can add to introduce these improvements, the more likely they will be adopted, and there’s no better friction than none at all!
Read more…
The Embedded Image Preview (EIP) technique introduced in this article allows us to load preview images during lazy loading using progressive JPEGs, Ajax and HTTP range requests without having to transfer additional data. JPEG files, for which lazy loading is mostly used, have the possibility, according to the specification, to store the data contained in them in such a way that first the coarse and then the detailed image contents are displayed. Instead of having the image built up from top to bottom during loading, a blurred image can be displayed very quickly, which gradually becomes sharper and sharper.
Read more…
