Delivering a great user experience through the holiday season is a marathon, not a sprint. Here are ten things you can do to make sure your site is fast and available every day, not just Black Friday. Your design and development teams are working hard to attract users and turn browsers into buyers, with strategies like:High-resolution images and videosGeo-targeted campaigns and contentThird-party tags for audience analytics and retargetingHowever, all those strategies can take a toll on the speed and user experience of your pages – and each introduces the risk of introducing single points of failure (SPoFs). Below we've curated ten steps for making your users happy throughout the holidays (and beyond). If you're scrambling to optimize your site before Black Friday, you still have time to implement some or all of these best practices. And if you're already close to being ready for your holiday code freeze, you can use this as a checklist to validate that you've ticked all the boxes on y

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Vitals Overview dashboard in SpeedCurve — your new starting point for exploring the performance of your site.When it comes to improving web performance, the journey usually looks like this:Identify where the problems areDiagnose why they’re happeningFix the issuesValidate that the fixes workedOur new Vitals Overview dashboard is designed to make that critical first step — identifying performance issues — faster, clearer, and more actionable.What are Web Vitals and why do they matter?Web Vitals are a focused set of metrics that shine a light on the most important parts of the user experience. While SpeedCurve tracks a wide range of performance data, Vitals give you a quick, high-level view of where your site delights users… or where it’s letting them down.Here’s a quick snapshot of what each Vital tells you:Backend (Time to First Byte) – How quickly your server respondsFirst Contentful Paint – How fast something first appears on screenLargest

You've probably started to notice retail campaigns for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and even Christmas! Online campaigns are pricey, so the landing page should be the MOST scrutinized page of your site — but too often it's an afterthought. I tracked the rendering times of campaign landing pages for leading retailers to see how they compare — who's fast, who's slow, and what's causing their page speed bottlenecks.As you can see in this competitive benchmarking leaderboard, rendering speeds varied across pages ranging from Apple to Uber. The fastest campaign page — which belonged to IKEA.com — started to render in about 1 second, which is great to see.But for many of the other pages, it was common to wait 3 or 4 seconds — or longer! — to see meaningful content.In this post, we'll cover:Why the speed of your campaign landing pages matters... possibly even more than most of the other pages on your siteWhy performance issues on campaign landing pages often go unnoticedCommon performance issues

"Should I use synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, or CrUX?" We hear this question a lot. It's important to know the strengths and limitations of each monitoring tool and what they’re best used for, so we don’t miss out on valuable insights.This post includes:How synthetic and real user monitoring (RUM) workWhat is CrUX?Is CrUX a substitute for RUM?When and why to use each tool An obscure cheese metaphorPlus a quick survey question at the end!Synthetic and real user monitoringFor the longest time, there have been two primary forms of front-end web performance data.Synthetic data (sometimes called lab data) is performance data collected based on a very specific set of variables. For example, you can choose to test your product page on a 3G network, from Italy, on a Chrome desktop browser.Real user data (sometimes called field data) is performance data collected from real users as they browse your site under a wide variety of contexts (different browsers, devices, connection speed

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, we compared each LoAF metric for desktop and mobile and correlated it to conversion rate. We saw some surprising trends alongside some expected patterns.We recently shipped support for Long Animation Frames (LoAF). We're buzzing with excitement about having better diagnostic capabilities, including script attribution for INP and our new experimental metric, Total Blocking Duration (TBD).While Andy has gone deep in the weeds on LoAF, in this post let's put the new set of metrics to the test and see how well they reflect the user experience. We'll look at real-world data from real websites and find an answer to the question: How do Long Animation Frames affect user behavior?First, what is a Long Animation Frame?We've covered Long Animation Frames (LoAFs) extensively in a couple of recent posts:The Definitive Guide to Long Animation Fra

This month's performance hero is someone who's helped some of the biggest brands in the world speed up their sites – and who generously shares his wealth of experience with the performance community through articles, videos, and conference talks. Thank you for everything you do, Harry Roberts!What we love about Harry is that he's both an idealist who believes in delivering great user experiences, and a pragmatist who knows how to measure the impact of site speed on businesses. Harry and I recently had what we jokingly called a fireside chat. As a SpeedCurve power user with his clients, Harry had a lot of great feedback and insights into how he uses our tools. But our conversation was actually much broader, so I thought a lot of folks might be interested to hear Harry's thoughts about performance in general. I also thought it would be great to give him long-overdue kudos as this month's Performance Hero!Keep scrolling to watch the video of our chat and hear why Harry had the following t

We've made a major update to how you create, manage, and monitor performance budgets in SpeedCurve – and we think you're going to love it.Until now, performance budgets lived inside your Favorites dashboards. That worked well for surfacing budget charts in context with the rest of your performance data, but it made managing budgets frustrating because they were spread all over your Favorites dashboards.To fix this issue, we've moved performance budget management into its own dedicated Budgets dashboard. This change unlocks powerful new capabilities and makes tracking your performance thresholds and goals easier and more intuitive than ever.Centralized budget managementPerformance budgets now live in their own dedicated dashboard. This gives you a single, central place to view, manage, and monitor your budgets without having to navigate through multiple Favorites dashboards.Easier navigation and filteringWe’ve introduced both a list view and the familiar card view, so you can choose the

Now you can integrate robust real user monitoring into your Magento project in minutes!As a product manager, I have to say there are few things more flattering than having our users build apps that empower other folks to use our product.Hot on the heels of our SpeedCurve RUM for Shopify app is a new open‑source Magento module – from Jesper Ingels and the awesome team at Bluebird Day – that lets you integrate SpeedCurve real user monitoring into your Magento project in minutes – no coding required!Keep reading to learn the benefits of gathering real user data and how to get started.The SpeedCurve Magento 2 module is designed for standard Magento 2 front-end themes (Luma-based or custom themes using Layout XML, RequireJS, etc.).With this module, you can:Enter your SpeedCurve RUM ID (available on your Settings page) and the RUM script loads automatically on your pagesConfigure all settings via the Magento Admin Panel, including RUM ID, page labels, and cookie consent handling.Manage page

SpeedCurve now has a Shopify app to make installing and using SpeedCurve in your Shopify store much easier. With this app, you can quickly set up real user monitoring – no coding required. Here's how to install the SpeedCurve RUM app in your Shopify store, along with troubleshooting and next steps.In ecommerce, speed isn’t just nice to have – it’s a competitive advantage. Slow websites lead to frustrated users, lost sales, and damaged brand trust. With the SpeedCurve RUM app for Shopify, you can track metrics like Core Web Vitals, identify performance issues, measure the impact of site speed on conversion rates, and stay ahead of page slowdowns – no coding required.How to install and use SpeedCurve RUM1. Create your SpeedCurve accountIf you don't already have an account, it's easy to create a free 30-day trial. (No credit card required!) 2. Install the SpeedCurve RUM Shopify app If you haven't yet done this, install the SpeedCurve Shopify app.3. Connect the Shopify app to your SpeedCur

If you run a Shopify store, you already know how critical it is to provide a seamless shopping experience. That's why I was so excited when the folks at SpeedCurve asked me to draw on my Shopify experience to build their new RUM app for Shopify storefronts. Now I'm here to let you know how it works and why it's an important part of your UX toolset.In ecommerce, speed isn’t just nice to have – it’s a competitive advantage. Slow websites lead to frustrated users, lost sales, and damaged brand trust.With the SpeedCurve RUM app, you can track metrics like Core Web Vitals, identify performance issues, measure the impact of site speed on conversion rates, and stay ahead of page slowdowns – no coding required.> How to enable SpeedCurve RUM in your Shopify storeSite speed is critical in ecommerceBefore we dig into the new SpeedCurve RUM details, let’s cover why front-end web performance is so important for online stores.Poor performance increases bounce rateShoppers are impatient. A delay of j