Happy 10th Birthday to Us!

It’s hard to believe ten years have gone by so quickly. Every day, we pinch ourselves at our great luck that we get to build great tools to support great people like you.

To celebrate our tenth birthday, we’re offering a special discount to new trial accounts and monthly subscribers. When you sign up (or switch over) to an annual subscription, you'll receive an extra 10% off the annual price – bringing your total discount to 30% – for the first year of your annual plan.

(This offer expires on December 31, so act soon!)

Which Retail Sites Are Fastest – and Why?

In the latest snapshot of our US Retail Page Speed Benchmarks, Lowe's took the #1 spot with a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time of 0.7 seconds on desktop with a fast connection. What makes this page feel fast, despite containing over 300 requests and weighing more than 6 MB? A speedy backend time, lean image and JavaScript files, and a focus on delivering critical content first.

(Page Speed Benchmarks is a public-facing, interactive set of leaderboards. 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 are built.)

Want to benchmark your own site against your competitors? It's easy!

Web Performance Guide for Retailers

Making customers happy is the not-so-secret secret to retail success. Delivering a fast, consistent online experience has been proven to measurably increase every metric retailers care about – from conversions and revenue to retention and brand perception. Our Retail Performance Guide covers:

• How to benchmark your site against your competitors
• How page speed affects your business
• The most common performance culprits, and how to fix them

Five Low-Risk Improvements to Your Website Before the Holidays

Jason Grigsby at CloudFour lists some fast, low-risk site improvements you can make before your holiday code freeze. Check them out quick!

Adobe improved Core Web Vitals and increased conversion rate by 37%

Our friends at Adobe shared this great success story. After making performance optimizations, they saw significant improvements to their Core Web Vitals, including a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) decrease from 7.2 seconds to 3.4 seconds. (When LCP decreases, it gives visitors the feeling that the site loads fast since it takes less time to load the largest piece of content on the page.)

After these improvements, Adobe saw gains in key business metrics, such as:

• SEO visits – Visitors coming through search engines increased by 19%
• Repeat visits – 14% increase in returning traffic
• Bounce rate – Went down by 12%
• Conversion rate – Increased by 37%

Performance Budgets to the Rescue!

We love it when customers share their performance wins. Recently, our friends at Unsplash shared how one of their performance budgets caught a regression after they shipped some new features to their home page.

(If you're not already using performance budgets, check out our Complete Guide to Web Performance Budgets to get started.)

The Fight for the Main Thread

If the concept of the "main thread" is new to you, that's because it doesn't get discussed nearly enough in the context of site speed. The main thread is the critical part of the browser that's responsible for handling user events, rendering the UI, and executing JavaScript. The main thread can only perform tasks consecutively, which means that a page's rendering time will be hurt by any files that are time-consuming to process. 

In this detailed, must-read article in Smashing Magazine, Geoff Graham explains how to diagnose and fix third-party bottlenecks that block the main thread, slow down your pages, and hurt your users' experience:

• How to spot JavaScript long tasks and blocking JS
• How to use Core Web Vitals, like Interaction to Next Paint and Total Blocking Time, as metrics for measuring main thread activity
• How to optimize scripts that are blocking or slowing down the main thread

Pushing Pixels: How to Design, Build and Monitor the Performance of Our Content Islands

In his recent talk at performance.now(), SpeedCurve founder Mark Zeman shared a fresh perspective on building a faster web:

Often when building websites, our units of measure are “pages”. It’s time to get more granular! Not every pixel on a page has the same importance. Users want to see the most important content first, while the ad team might want their content delivered early as well. Content elements need deliberate prioritisation rather than trying to make the whole page fast. Let’s pull the idea of a “page” apart and explore a design and development pipeline that focuses on islands of content. How do we then design, build and monitor the performance of our content islands?

> Watch the video
> See the slides