Preload scripts
In my previous post I talked about how loading scripts asynchronously reduces the impact of JavaScript resulting in a (much) faster user experience. But even when scripts are loaded async, the browser may still twiddle its thumbs for a second or more waiting for the first script to arrive. This delay can be decreased by using link rel=preload like this:
<link rel="preload" href="main.js" as="script">
Load scripts async
This blog post has a simple conclusion: Load script asynchronously! Simple, and yet the reality is that most scripts are still loaded synchronously. Understanding the importance of loading scripts asynchronously might help increase adoption of this critical performance improvement, so we're going to walk through the evolution of async script loading starting way back in 2007. Here's what loading 14 scripts looked like in Internet Explorer 7:
A/B Testing JSONP and the Preloader with RUM
SpeedCurve is a SPA (Single Page App) so we construct the charts dynamically using JSONP. It works great, but we're always looking for ways to make the dashboards faster. One downside to making requests dynamically is that the browser preloader isn't used. This isn't a factor for later SPA requests, but on the first page view the preloader might still bring some benefits. Or maybe not. We weren't sure, so we ran an A/B test. Long story short, doing the first JSONP request via markup caused charts to render 300 milliseconds faster.
Measuring Blocking Resources
SpeedCurve reports the number of critical blocking resources in the page. These are the resources that block rendering. Since it's important that users see your content as quickly as possible, it's important to know what might be causing your page to render slowly. We recently enhanced the way we measure blocking resources and wanted to share those improvements with our customers as well as the performance community at large.
The main culprits that block rendering are scripts and stylesheets that are loaded synchronously. A great way to avoid this blocking problem is to load your scripts and stylesheets asynchronously. You can do that for scripts by using the async and defer attributes, plus other programmatic techniques. Loading stylesheets asynchronously is less popular but is still possible using techniques like loadCSS.
