Performance

Too often, any talk of web performance quickly ventures into the land of heavy geekery. Terms like DNS lookups, Gzipping, minifying, far future expires headers, caching, ETags and more are thrown around and consequently lose the attention of most non-techy people. This perpetuates a mentality that p

So often we cram a load of crap onto a single web page and then play silly buggers trying to get them to load efficiently. Instead design for actual performance.

To use web fonts with wide browser support, we need the font files in and format. Who does not care about Internet Explorer, Safari on Mac OS before Sierra...

Formalizing and distributing knowledge about CX is critical. However, there are a few elements of digital government that seem to have been overlooked.

Google Fonts is fast. Now it’s faster. Much faster.

Ever since responsive web design started, we've had a problem with the way images load on the web. Now, Firefox is fixing the problem. Add width & height att...

Grab bag of design tweaks. Like avoiding purple, the slowest color (lie)

In this article, Ken Harker explains what third-party resource requests really are and which common optimization strategies can help reduce the impact on the user experience. By carefully considering how third-party requests will fit into your website during the design stage, you’ll be able to avoid the most significant negative impacts.

Native apps often feature transitions between states that both look great and help communicate the type of navigation to the user. The bad news: creating tra...

An update on the Google Fonts CSS API—how it works, how to use it, and how it can efficiently deliver your web fonts.

I’ve been doing a few audits of late, and one thing that keeps coming up is the use of transition effects on page load (or above the fold content). This post looks at some of the performance pitfalls that can arise from this practice, as well as what you should keep in mind.

This post stems from a conversation I had with a good friend of mine last week. We were talking about how to boost website traffic, and conversions. As I explained to him, and as we'll get to in this post, there's more to the game than just fresh, keyword laden content.

Looking at gaps can help inform performance strategy

Despite advances in browser tooling, automated evaluation, lab tools, guidance, and runtimes, modern teams struggle to deliver even decent performance with today's popular frameworks. This is not a technical problem per se. It's a management issue, and one that teams can conquer with the right frame of mind and support.

The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.

Compare performance metrics of your pages against each other or your competitors using Google PageSpeed Insights.

At the end of 2021, the Chrome team shipped some functionality that has the ability to make or break sites meeting the Core Web Vitals. So, let’s learn a little bit more about the Back/Forward Cache (aka bfcache), and what you can do to test if your website is compatible with it.

Introducing Partytown, a lightweight open-source solution that reduces execution delays due to third-party JavaScript by offloading third-party scripts to web workers, which run in background threads.

Knowing where to begin optimizing your application's JavaScript can be daunting. If you're taking advantage of modern tooling such as webpack, however, tree shaking might be a good place to start!

Earlier this week, I posted a video on YouTube about how to create your own personal jQuery, and wrote a text article version of it as well. On YouTube, someone in the comments was very insistent that jQuery has no impact on performance whatsoever. What is it, 30kb? Even at 7Mps it still downloads in just a few milliseconds. You don’t need the latest hardware or superfast broadband to handle it.

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Best Performance Testing Tutorial and Site which helps to provide the core and in-depth knowledge of Performance Testing.

Tools like Google Tag Manager and Adobe Tag Manager offer wonderful capabilities, but they can be detrimental to user experience

Why lazy loadable components can cause CLS on slower connections and how to prevent it.

As we think about ways in which government sites meet the needs of their users, speed is an integral part of what makes a site inclusive and accessible to more people.

Steve Souders had a great blog post last year that talked about Frontend Single Points Of Failure (SPOF).  Given the continuing rise in 3rd...

Great performance is key for great UX. We’ve told you how to tackle the low-hanging fruit: optimizing images for faster page loads. Now it’s time to fight the boss: JavaScript. Check out our handy guide!