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

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