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NEW! Holiday checklist, Core Web Vitals best practices & the fastest site on the web

Nov 4, 2024

Hi <<First Name>>,

How is it possible that the holidays are just around the corner?! If you're anything like me, this season has snuck up on you. But no worries – this edition is filled with tips and inspiration to help you keep your site fast and your users happy. 

Keep scrolling for...
  • Your holiday readiness checklist (that even procrastinators should find helpful)
  • The fastest and slowest pages in our US Retail Benchmarks
  • The fastest site on the web
  • Why Chinese travelers struggle to access global travel sites
  • The most effective ways to improve Core Web Vitals
  • Core Web Vitals for Shopify themes
  • How to diagnose TTFB issues
  • How to provide better attribution for your RUM metrics
  • And this month's performance hero: Sia Karamalegos!
Until next month,
Tammy
m: @tammy
t: @tameverts

2024 Holiday Readiness Checklist 

If the holiday season has crept up on you, fear not! There's still a lot you can do to keep your site fast – and your users happy – through the holidays and beyond. Cliff Crocker shares 10 things you can do before your holiday code freeze.

US Retail Benchmarks 

With the holiday shopping season in mind, I took a look at our US Retail Benchmark dashboard, which tracks industry-leading home pages. Twelve sites delivered Largest Contentful Paint times – on a fast desktop connection – that were under Google's 2.5 second threshold, which is great. Five sites were slower (and in some cases significantly slower), which is not great. 

What did the pages with the fastest LCP times have in common? Lean images that were served quickly and early in the critical rendering path. For example, on the Amazon home page, which had an LCP time of just 0.59 seconds, the LCP image is the fourth request (out of a total of 73 requests).

Slower pages served the LCP element much later. In one case, the LCP element was the 154th resource request on the page. Yikes.

Wondering how to improve LCP times for your pages? Here's everything you need to know to start measuring, debugging, and optimizing LCP.

The most effective ways to improve Core Web Vitals 

So many potential page speed optimizations, so little time. How do you know which to focus on? The Chrome Dev team just updated their list of LCP best practices you should focus on to improve Core Web Vitals. 

How is this website so fast?

How does McMaster-Carr – a company founded more than 100 years ago – have one of the fastest websites on the internet? Wes Bos takes a look behind the scenes and details all the techniques they are using to make it fast:

"They are doing it all — prefetching HTML, inlined CSS, fixed images,  pushstate — and all on a stack with 15 year old tech."

Why Chinese travelers struggle to access global travel sites

Despite the fact that China is the world’s largest outbound tourism market, many travel sites aren't  ready for Chinese travelers. Gabrielle Roper explains common web performance issues in China along with tips for improving performance and accessibility.

How to diagnose Time to First Byte 

Is TTFB a hot new metric? No. Is it a key performance metric for tracking responsiveness? YES! Slow TTFB virtually guarantees your site will deliver a poor UX. Bonus: It's widely available across browsers! In this short video, Tim Kadlec explains how to diagnose TTFB issues.

How to provide better attribution for your RUM metrics 

Real user data is great. Actionable real user data is better! Tim Kadlec to the rescue yet again with an excellent post showing how to make more meaningful, intuitive attributions for your RUM metrics (including Core Web Vitals like Interaction to Next Paint) – making it easier for you to find and fix issues.

Performance Hero: Sia Karamalegos!

Continuing our series of Performance Heroes, this month we celebrate Sia Karamalegos! Chances are you've come to know Sia 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 also recently launched a cool new project that all you Shopify users should take note of. Keep scrolling for details!

Shopify Theme Vitals

Sia recently launched a free resource: Shopify Theme Vitals. Shopify Theme Vitals leverages the HTTPArchive and Chrome User Experience report (CrUX) to provide Shopify devs and merchants with an aggregated data set of Core Web Vitals (CWV) performance by theme. 

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