Essential knowledge for making your web pages faster.
I announced the HTTP Archive six years ago. Six years ago! It has exceeded my expectations and its value continues to grow. In order to expand the vision, I’ve asked Ilya Grigorik, Rick Viscomi, and Pat Meenan to take over leadership of the project. The HTTP Archive is part of the Internet Archive. The code […]
Velocity Origin Story In 2007, my first book, High Performance Web Sites, was selling very well. That, plus the launch of YSlow, brought more attention to web performance. As a result, Jon Jenkins invited me to give a tech talk at Amazon. Afterward, he, John Rauser, and I, plus a few other performance-minded folk, had a […]
The HTTP Archive crawls the world’s top URLs twice each month and records detailed information like the number of HTTP requests, the most popular image formats, and the use of gzip compression. In addition to aggregate stats, the HTTP Archive has the same data for individual websites plus images and video of the site loading. […]
A big change in the World of Performance for 2015 [this post is being cross-posted from the 2015 Performance Calendar] is the shift to metrics that do a better job of measuring the user experience. The performance industry grew up focusing on page load time, but teams with more advanced websites have started replacing PLT […]
Background The HTTP Archive crawls the world’s top 500K URLs twice each month and records detailed information like the number of HTTP requests, the most popular image formats, and the use of gzip compression. We also crawl the top 5K URLs on real iPhones as part of the HTTP Archive Mobile. In addition to aggregate […]
Netflix published a great article, Making Netflix.com Faster, about their move to Node.js. The article mentions how they use performance.timing.domInteractive to measure improvements: In order to test and understand the impact of our choices, we monitor a metric we call time to interactive (tti). Amount of time spent between first known startup of the application platform and […]
The takeaways from this post are: If your website has a hero image, make sure it loads and renders as early as possible. Many designs that feature a hero image suffer from HID (Hero Image Delay) mostly due to blocking scripts and stylesheets. You should add custom metrics to your website to make sure you […]
I’m excited to announce that I’m joining SpeedCurve! SpeedCurve provides insight into the interaction between performance and design to help companies deliver fast and engaging user experiences. I’ll be joining Mark Zeman, who launched the company in 2013. We make a great team. I’ve been working on web performance since 2002. Mark has a strong design […]
or “Duration includes Blocking” Resource Timing is a great way to measure how quickly resources download. Unfortunately, almost everyone I’ve spoken with does this using the “duration” attribute and are not aware that “duration” includes blocking time. As a result, “duration” time values are (much) greater than the actual download time, giving developers unexpected results. This issue […]
With the increase in 3rd party content on websites, I’ve evangelized heavily about how Frontend SPOF blocks the page from rendering. This is timely given the recent Doubleclick outage. Although I’ve been warning about Frontend SPOF for years, I’ve never measured how long a hung response blocks rendering. I used to think this depended on the browser, […]