Hello <<First Name>>,
Welcome to another edition of Speed Matters! Some highlights:
- How fast are top travel sites for mobile users?
- What is page bloat and why should you care about it?
- What you need to know about Core Web Vitals and SEO
- How to understand and measure the relationship between performance and conversion rates
- A new job board just for performance work!
If you're new to performance (or just need a refresher), I hope you find this newsletter helpful.
Until next time,
Tammy
m: @tammy
t: @tameverts
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How fast are top travel sites for mobile?
Travel is wonderful and relaxing... unless your travel apps are slow and frustrating. Looking at some of the most popular travel sites in the UK and EU, it's a bit disheartening to see how unresponsive so many are for mobile users. The most common issues: blocking JavaScript and CSS, heavy custom fonts, and sluggish backends.
(Page Speed Benchmarks is a public-facing, interactive set of dashboards. We test and rank industry-leading websites based on how fast their pages appear to load from a user’s perspective. It's a handy tool for benchmarking your own site, as well as digging down to see how the fastest and slowest pages in the dashboards are built.)
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How back/forward cache helped Yahoo! JAPAN News increase revenue by 9% on mobile
In this case study, Yuriko Hirota shares how Yahoo! JAPAN News, one of the most popular news platforms in Japan, drove a concerted effort to improve their bfcache hit rate and saw significant user experience and business improvements as a result. Specifically, the results of the A/B test they conducted showed that pages that use bfcache had a 9% increase in ad revenue.
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What is page bloat? And how is it hurting your business, your search rank, and your users?
For more than ten years I've been writing about page bloat, its impact on site speed, and ultimately how it affects your users and your business. This post covers:
- How much pages have grown over the past year
- How page bloat hurts your business and – at the heart of everything – your users
- How 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 experience
- Page size targets
- How to track page size and complexity
- How to fight regressions
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Too much JavaScript? Why the frontend needs to build better
One company found that too much JavaScript costs them $700,000 per year, per kilobyte. In this interview by Loraine Lawson, performance expert Alex Russell explains what needs to change.
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Core Web Vitals for SEO: What do we need to know?
Search is complicated and, understandably, quite opaque. Harry Roberts has written an exhaustive guide to understanding Core Web Vitals, why they're important, and what to consider (and what not to worry about) when it comes to SEO.
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Exploring performance and conversion rates just got easier
The speed of your site has a direct impact on your business. We recently made it easier to explore business metrics, like conversion rate, alongside your performance metrics in SpeedCurve. Cliff Crocker explains how, along with a handful of use cases, in this super-informative post.
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Perfwork is a new jobs board – created by Tim Kadlec – focusing on job opportunities for web performance professionals and folks who want to work in the performance industry. New jobs are being posted regularly, so it's worth checking out!
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On becoming a VP of Engineering: The path to VP
In this series of blog posts, Emily Nakashima generously shares her journey to becoming VP of Engineering at Honeycomb. Looking back on her path, she offers valuable insights into the traits and experiences that led her to this role.
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Where you can find us IRL...
- Smashing Conf Freiburg – September 4-6
- Beyond Tellerrand Berlin – September 11-12 – I'll be doing a talk about one of my favourite topics: the psychology of web performance.
- Smashing Conf Antwerp – October 9-12
- P99 Conf (virtual) – October 18 & 19 – I'm presenting on the hows and whys of performance budgets. This is a free online conference, with a huge roster of excellent speakers, so it's definitely worth checking out.
- PerfNow Amsterdam – November 2-3 – SpeedCurve founder Mark Zeman will be talking about performance by design. I'll be sharing insights into the changing landscape of performance teams.
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