NEW! Lighthouse 10, Core Web Vitals updates, and Interaction to Next Paint
There is a lot of excitement in the world of web performance these days, and April has been no exception! At SpeedCurve, we've been focused on staying on top of the items that affect you the most.
Here is a look at what's new in SpeedCurve:
- Support for Lighthouse 10, including metric scoring changes as well as audits
- Updated RUM Core Web Vitals, including the much-anticipated addition of Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
All of this work driven by the community is having a big impact in our collective goal to make performance accessible for everyone.
Read on to learn more about these exciting changes!
NEW! Home, Site, Page and Tests dashboards
Things have been busy over here at SpeedCurve HQ! Coming off of the back of our latest RUM Compare dashboard release, we are super excited to launch four new dashboards to make your life better, your work easier, and your websites faster.
- Home - Well, now you have one. We needed a place for folks to land when they were jumping into all that SpeedCurve has to offer. The newly released Home page is a great starting place, pulling together views of both RUM and Synthetic data and directing you on where to dig in next.
- Sites - We've rebuilt our Sites dashboard to give you a holistic look across all of the URLs you are monitoring. Start here to understand which areas of your site need the most attention and identify areas you can have the most impact.
- Pages - This detailed view gives you trended information for all the metrics you know and love. Easily identify areas of opportunity and how things are performing over time for specific pages you are monitoring.
- Tests - We've had a lot of requests for this, so we're happy to deliver it. You can now see a list of your latest synthetic tests and spot any failed tests.
Let's take a look!
Why you need to know your site's performance plateau (and how to find it)
"I made my pages faster, but my business and user engagement metrics didn't change. WHY???"
"How do I know how fast my pages should be?"
"How can I demonstrate the business value of performance to people in my organization?"
If you've ever asked yourself any of these questions, then you could find the answers in identifying and understanding the performance plateau for your site.
What is the "performance plateau"?
The performance plateau is the point at which changes to your website’s rendering metrics (such as Start Render and Largest Contentful Paint) cease to matter because you’ve bottomed out in terms of business and user engagement metrics.
In other words, if your performance metrics are on the performance plateau, making them a couple of seconds faster probably won't help your business.
The concept of the performance plateau isn't new. I first encountered it more than ten years ago, when I was looking at data for a number of sites and noticed that – not only was there a correlation between performance metrics and business/engagement metrics – there was also a noticeable plateau in almost every correlation chart I looked at.
A few months ago someone asked me if I've done any recent investigation into the performance plateau, to see if the concept still holds true. When I realized how much time has passed since my initial research, I thought it would be fun to take a fresh look.
In this post, I'll show how to use your own data to find the plateau for your site, and then what to do with your new insights.
2022 in review: New dashboards, Core Web Vitals enhancements, third-party tracking & more!
Every year feels like a big year, and 2022 has been no exception. Not only did we celebrate our ninth birthday (!!!) we also:
- Launched a series of new and improved dashboards to help you identify and fix your performance issues more quickly and efficiently (More on those below.)
- Expanded our test agent locations to bring you even more places to test from worldwide
- Jumped into in-person events, and were so happy to catch up with some of you at SmashingConf and performance.now() (You can watch videos of my talk about performance budgets and Andy Davies' talk about third parties.)
Keep reading for a full recap of the past year...
NEW! RUM Compare dashboard
Exploring real user (RUM) data can be a hugely enlightening process. It uncovers things about your users and their behavior that you never might have suspected. That said, it's not uncommon to spend precious time peeling back the layers of the onion, only to find false positives or uncertainty in all that data.
At SpeedCurve, we believe a big part of our job is making your job easier. This was a major driver behind the Synthetic Compare dashboard we released last year, which so many of you given us great feedback on.
As you may have guessed, since then we've been hard at work coming up with the right way to explore and compare your RUM datasets using a similar design pattern. Today, we are thrilled to announce your new RUM Compare dashboard!
With your RUM Compare dashboard, you can easily generate side-by-side comparisons for any two cohorts of data. Some of the many reasons you might want to do this include:
- Improve Core Web Vitals by identifying the tradeoffs between pages that have different layout and construction
- Triage a performance regression related to the latest change or deployment to your site by looking at a before/after comparison
- Explore and compare different out-of-the-box cohorts, such as device types, geographies, page labels, and more
- Analyze A/B tests or experiments to understand which had the most impact on user behavior, as well as performance
- Optimize your funnel by understanding differences between users that convert or bounce from your site and users who don't
- Evaluate CDN performance by exploring the impact of time-of-day traffic patterns
Let's take a tour...
Page labels: Why they are important and how to use them
Labeling your pages in your synthetic and real user monitoring (RUM) tools is a crucial step in your performance monitoring setup. We recently released some exciting new capabilities for labeling your RUM pages that we want to share with you. This is also a great opportunity to reiterate why page labels are important, and to show you how easy it is to apply labels to your pages.
Why should I care about page labels?
There are so many benefits to labeling your pages in both your synthetic and real user monitoring (RUM) tools. Page labels give you the ability to:
- Compare and benchmark similar pages across different sites
- Create more meaningful performance budgets in RUM
- Correlate RUM data with synthetic diagnostics in the same charts (e.g., for Core Web Vitals that are measurable in synthetic and RUM)
- Prioritize performance optimizations according to their projected impact on real users
Ready to learn more? Let's get to it!
Element Timing: One true metric to rule them all?
One of the great things about Google's Core Web Vitals is that they provide a standard way to measure our visitors’ experience. Core Web Vitals can answer questions like:
- When was the largest element displayed? Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures when the largest visual element (image or video) finishes rendering.
- How much did the content move around as it loads? Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of a page.
- How responsive was the page to visitors' actions? First Input Delay (FID) measures how quickly a page responds to a user interaction, such as a click/tap or keypress.
Sensible defaults, such as Core Web Vitals, are a good start, but one pitfall of standard measures is that they can miss what’s actually most important.
The (potential) problems with Largest Contentful Paint
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) makes the assumption that the largest visible element is the most important content from the visitors’ perspective; however, we don’t have a choice about which element it measures. LCP may not be measuring the most appropriate – or even the same – element for each page view.
The LCP element can vary for first-time vs repeat visitors
In the case of a first-time visitor, the largest element might be a consent banner. On subsequent visits to the same page, the largest element might be an image for a product or a photo that illustrates a news story.
The screenshots from What Hifi (a UK audio-visual magazine) illustrate this problem. When the consent banner is shown, then one of its paragraphs is the LCP element. When the consent banner is not shown, an article title becomes the LCP element. In other words, the LCP timestamp varies depending on which of these two experiences the visitor had!
What Hi Fi with and without the consent banner visible
July 2022 product update: Web Vitals support, more synthetic test agents & performance heat maps
It's been another busy month here at SpeedCurve! Check out our latest product updates below.
June 2022 product update: Performance recommendations on Vitals dashboard, RUM path filters & more
We've been busy here at SpeedCurve HQ! Here's a roundup of our recent product updates.
Sampling RUM: A closer look
Being able to set a sample rate in your real user monitoring (RUM) tool allows you to monitor your pages while managing your spending. It's a great option if staying within a budget is important to you. With the ability to sample real user data, comes this question...
"What should my RUM sample rate be?"
This frequently asked question doesn't have a simple answer. Refining your sample rate can be hit or miss if you aren’t careful. In a previous post, I discussed a few considerations when determining how much RUM data you really need to make informed decisions. If you sample too much, you may be collecting a lot of data you may never use. On the other hand, if you sample too little, you risk creating variability in your data that is hard to trust.
In this post, we are going to do a bit of research and let the data speak for itself. I took a look at the impact of sampling at various levels for three t-shirt sized companies (Small, Medium, Large) with the hope of providing some guidance for those of you considering sampling your RUM data.
In this post, I'll cover:
- Methodology
- Key findings
- Considerations
- Recommendations
