This month, we've made some updates to our synthetic testing agents. In addition to upgrading the underlying operating system, we've added support for:Lighthouse 12.3.0 (previously 10.4.0)Chrome 133 (previously 126)Firefox 135 (previously 128)What has changed?We understand the sensitivity related to changes in your performance data.Synthetic updates are known to cause baseline changes due to hardware changes, browser optimization or in the case of Lighthouse, changes to the methodology.Here is a rundown of what's changed in this update:ChromeMoving from Chrome 126 to 133 should not have a huge impact on your metrics.As of Chrome 130, transparent text is no longer eligible to be considered for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) but this change doesn't appear to affect a larger number of sites. There were a number of updates to Chrome, which may affect Interaction to Next Paint (INP) introduced between 126 and 130, but as we don't measure INP with synthetic, there is no impact to your metric

We often hear how special, generous, and supportive the web performance community is. This didn't happen overnight. This month, we're excited to recognize someone who has been a huge part of creating the community culture we enjoy today: Sergey Chernyshev.Whether answering questions on social media, helping someone with a proposal for a conference talk, or simply being welcoming and kind to newcomers, webperf folks are some of the most generous people you could ever hope to find. There are so many folks out there who are organizing, educating, evangelizing, and building great tooling in an effort to improve user experience on the web. Sergey has been doing all of those things earlier and longer than almost everyone!Sergey is a well-known early champion of web performance and user experience. Among other things...Back in 2009, he started the first web performance meetup group in New York City, which is still running strong today.He lit the match for many conversations about how to impro

Have you ever looked at the page speed metrics – such as Start Render and Largest Contentful Paint – for your site in both your synthetic and real user monitoring tools and wondered "Why are these numbers so different?"Photo by FreepikPart of the answer is this: You have a lot of control over the design and code for the pages on your site, plus a decent amount of control over the first and middle mile of the network your pages travel over. But when it comes to the last mile – or more specifically, the last few feet – matters are no longer in your hands. Your synthetic testing tool shows you how your pages perform in a clean lab environment, using variables – such as browser, connection type, even CPU power – that you've selected.Your real user monitoring (RUM) tool shows you how your pages perform out in the real world, where they're affected by a myriad of variables that are completely outside your control. In this post we'll review a handful of those performance-leaching culprits tha

The median web page is 8% bigger than it was just one year ago. How does this affect your page speed, your Core Web Vitals, your search rank, your business, and most important – your users? Keep scrolling for the latest trends and analysis.For almost fifteen years, I've been writing about page bloat, its impact on site speed, and ultimately how it affects your users and your business. You might think this topic would be exhausted by now, but every year I learn new things – beyond the overarching fact that pages keep getting bigger and more complex, as you can see in this chart, using data from the HTTP Archive:In this post, we'll cover:How much pages have grown over the past yearHow page bloat hurts your business and – at the heart of everything – your usersHow page bloat affects Google's Core Web Vitals (and therefore SEO)If it's possible to have large pages that still deliver a good user experiencePage size targetsHow to track page size and complexityHow to fight regressionsanymouse1

Let's kick off the new year by celebrating someone who has not just had a huge impact on web performance over the past few years, but who has even more exciting stuff in the works for the future: Annie Sullivan!Annie leads the Chrome Speed Metrics team at Google, which has arguably had the most significant impact on web performance of the past decade. We've gotten to know Annie through frequent discussions, feedback sessions, and hallway talks at various events. Most recently we caught her closing keynote at performance.now() in November. Speaking from experience, driving change at scale from within a large organization can be very challenging. Annie and her team navigate this arduous task with true passion for web performance and for improving the user experience. Read on for a great recap of a recent discussion with Annie and just a few of the highlights that make her a true performance hero.In her recent performance.now() talk, which is a must-watch, Annie took us through key learni

We love writing articles and blog posts that help folks solve real web performance and UX problems. Here are the ones you loved most in 2024. (The number one item may surprise you!)Some of these articles come from our recently published Web Performance Guide – a collection of evergreen how-to resources (written by actual humans!) that will help you master website monitoring, analytics, and diagnostics. The rest come from this blog, where we tend to publish industry news and analysis. Regardless of the source, we hope you find these pieces useful!10. Five ways cookie consent managers hurt web performance (and how to fix them)Cookie consent popups and banners are everywhere, and they're silently hurting the speed of your pages. Learn the most common problems – and their workarounds – with measuring performance with content manager platforms in place.9. Best practices for optimizing imagesThey say a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately that picture can also cost you 1,000 kilo

Every year feels like a big year here at SpeedCurve, and 2024 was no exception. Here's a recap of product highlights designed to make your performance monitoring even better and easier!Our biggest achievements this year have centred on making it easier for you to:Gather more meaningful real user monitoring (RUM) dataGet actionable insights from Core Web VitalsSimplify your synthetic testingGet expert performance coaching when and how you need itKeep reading to learn more...INP replaced FIDIn the spring, Google made it official: Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as the responsiveness metric in Core Web Vitals (the trifecta of performance metrics that are a key ingredient in Google's search ranking algorithm).Correlation chart demonstrating that as INP gets worse, so does conversion rate for mobile usersWe've been tracking INP since well before Google made the announcement, so SpeedCurve users didn't have to scramble to switch over to a new metric. Because we've been t

This month, we celebrate everything that OG performance hero Pat Meenan has done – and continues to do – for the web performance community.When we started the Performance Hero series earlier this year, we had an idea of the types of folks in our community we wanted to acknowledge:People who are making a difference in web performancePeople who are humblePeople who give without expectationPeople who don't necessarily crave the spotlightWhen looking at these attributes – for a lot of us who have been around this space for more years than we care to mention – it's hard not to think about everyone's favorite web performance OG: Pat Meenan. This month, we celebrate all that Pat has done and continues to do for web performance. Pat, who is currently a software engineer at Google, is the definition of humble. When we reached out to him about this post, he was quick to point out others who he felt had made a bigger impact in 2024. We look forward to celebrating them as we continue recognizing p

Did you know that key performance metrics – like Core Web Vitals – aren't supported in Safari? If that's news to you, you're not alone! Here's why that is... and what we and the rest of the web performance community are doing to fix it.Somebody pinch me. Seeing this post and the resulting thread gives me great hope.Nicole Sullivan (aka Stubbornella, WebKit Engineering Manager at Apple, and OG web performance evangelist) isn't making promises or dangling a carrot. Nonetheless, it's evidence of the willingness for some public discussion on a topic that's been exhaustively discussed in our community for years. Nicole's post has gotten some great responses from many leaders in our community, hopefully shaping a strong use case for future WebKit support for Core Web Vitals.(If you're new to performance, Core Web Vitals is a set of three metrics – Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint – that are intended to measure the rendering speed, interactivity

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