Delivering a great user experience throughout 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 o

Our development team recently emerged from an offsite with two wonderful improvements to SpeedCurve. The team tackled a project to unify our filtering, and then they over-delivered with a re-Vital-ized dashboard that I'm finding to be one of the most useful views in the product. Take a look at the recent updates – and a big thank you to our amazing team for putting so much love into SpeedCurve!Start simple, go deep...Performance is hard, complex, and riddled with nuance. There is a sea of data collected by SpeedCurve and endless ways to interpret that data.New users of the product crave good design and simplicity in an effort to make sense of this firehose of performance information.Power users desire diagnostic capabilities that require extensive use of the latest and greatest browser APIs.Sometimes it's hard to do both and still provide meaningful information to both audiences. We embrace this challenge and, wherever possible, adopt the principle of starting with a simplistic overvie

Sia Karamalegos is a web performance diva we've come to know through her many articles, workshops, conference talks, and her stint as an MC at performance.now() last year – not to mention her role in speeding up a pretty big slice of the internet! Sia is kind, funny, smart as heck, and always down to talk web performance (especially if you have a Shopify site). For those reasons and many more, we are excited to share that Sia is this month's Performance Hero!Sia currently works as a freelance web performance engineer. She was previously at Shopify, helping their merchants make their sites faster. She is a Google Developer Expert in web technologies, an active member of the W3C Web Performance Working Group, co-organizer of the Eleventy Meetup and... well, you can read the rest here.Recent performance win at ShopifyWhile Sia's impressive bio speaks for itself, her commitment to improving performance cannot be overstated. She shared a recent performance win with us from her time at Shopi

Here's a detailed walkthrough showing how to make more meaningful and intuitive attributions for your RUM metrics – which makes it much easier for you to zero in on your performance issues.Real user monitoring (RUM) has always been incredibly important for any organization focused on performance. RUM – also known as field testing – captures performance metrics as real users browse your website and helps you understand how actual users experience your site. But it’s only in the last few years that RUM data has started to become more actionable, allowing you to diagnose what is making your pages slower or less usable for your visitors.Making newer RUM metrics – such as Core Web Vitals – more actionable has been a significant priority for standards bodies. A big part of this shift has been better attribution, so we can tell what's actually going on when RUM metrics change.Core Web Vitals metrics – like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout

Paper cut: (literal) A wound caused by a piece of paper or any thin, sharp material that can slice through skin. (figurative) A trivial-seeming problem that causes a surprising amount of pain.We all love big showy features, and this year we've released our share of those. But sometimes it's the small stuff that can make a big difference. We recently took a look at our backlog of smaller requests from our customers – which we labelled "paper cuts" – and decided to dedicate time to tackle them.Are they all glamorous changes? Maybe not, though some are pretty exciting.Are they worthy of a press release? Ha! We don't even know how to issue a press release.Will they make your day better and put a smile on your face? We sure hope so.In total, our wonderful development team tackled more than 30 paper cuts! These include:Exciting new chart types for Core Web Vitals and User HappinessFilter RUM data by regionCreate a set of tests for one or multiple sites or custom URLsTest directly from your s

We've made improvements to how we collect RUM data. Most SpeedCurve users won't see significant changes to Core Web Vitals or other metrics, but for a small number of users some metrics may increase.This post covers:What the changes areHow the changes can affect Core Web Vitals and other metricsWhy we are making the changes nowWhat's changing?By default, SpeedCurve RUM used to send its main beacon shortly after the load event fires, another soon after the visitor first interacts with the page, and then further beacons as User Timing marks and measures (AKA custom metrics) are added.This approach was sound when our main focus was measuring how quickly pages loaded or routes changed. But newer metrics – such as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – don't stop at page load or first interaction. As a result, they need to be measured throughout the entire lifecycle of the page.To work around some of the limitations of the current approach, we've added options t

A recent analysis of twenty leading websites found a surprising number of page speed optimizations that sites are not taking advantage of – to the detriment of their performance metrics, and more importantly, to the detriment of their users and ultimately their business.I spend a lot of time looking at waterfall charts and web performance audits. I recently investigated the test results for twenty top sites and discovered that many of them are not taking advantage of optimizations – including some fairly easy low-hanging fruit – that could make their pages faster, their users happier, and their businesses more successful.More on this below, but first, a few important reminders about the impact of page speed on businesses...Slow pages hurt your businessIn user survey after user survey over the past decade or so, site speed has emerged as one of the greatest factors that determine a person's satisfaction with a website (second only to security). Because our "need for speed" is deeply roo

Michelle Vu is one of the most knowledgeable, helpful, kind people you could ever hope to meet. As a founding member of Pinterest's performance team, she has created an incredibly strong culture of performance throughout Pinterest. She's also pioneered important custom metrics and practices, like Pinner Wait Time and performance budgets. We are super excited to share that Michelle is this month's Performance Hero!Michelle is a web performance industry veteran who has spent the last seven years making Pinterest fast and reliable. She was a founding member of Pinterest's performance team, establishing foundations of their program by setting up its synthetic and real user metrics, proactive alerts, and performance analysis tools, while fostering a culture of performance across teams. Michelle and her team at Pinterest pioneered the use of custom metrics when they introduced Pinner Wait Time (PWT). This metric measured the slowest loading time for content they considered critical for the u

Our customers often tell us how much they appreciate the user-friendliness of the articles we create for them, so we recently decided to make them available to everyone (not just SpeedCurve users). Introducing the Web Performance Guide!The Web Performance Guide is – as its name suggests – a collection of articles we've been writing over the years to answer the most common questions we field about performance topics like site speed, why it matters, how it's measured, website monitoring tools, metrics, analytics, and optimization techniques. You'll find the articles grouped into these topics...Business successMaking your pages faster isn't just for the web performance geeks in your organization. Site speed affects every business metric you care about – from bounce rate to conversions to search rank. This section gives you the data, tools, and tips to make everyone in your company care about how page speed affects your users and build a healthy culture of web performance.Core Web VitalsTh

Continuing our series of Performance Heroes, this month we celebrate Estela Franco! Estela is a passionate web performance and technical SEO specialist with more than ten years of contributing to our community. She loves to talk and share about web performance optimization, technical SEO, JavaScript, and Jamstack whenever she can.By day, you can find Estela working as a web performance specialist for Schneider Electric in Barcelona, Spain. Outside of work, her contributions as a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, a Storyblok Ambassador, co-organizer of the Barcelona Web Performance Meetup, and co-founder of the Mujeres en SEO community have made a huge impact on developers and web performance aficionados around the globe.Estela has the winning combination of a web development background coupled with a background in business administration. She started on the marketing side, discovering the fundamentals of SEO and digging deeper into the code to learn how websites work and how