Barry Pollard is a web developer who is obsessed with web performance. He is the author of the Manning book “HTTP/2 In Action” and is a one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive, including it’s annual Web Almanac state of the web report. He thinks the web is amazing but wants to make it even better.
At the end of 2021, the Chrome team shipped some functionality that has the ability to make or break sites meeting the Core Web Vitals. So, let’s learn a little bit more about the Back/Forward Cache (aka bfcache), and what you can do to test if your website is compatible with it.
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Using signals to deliver less, or different, content is a form of progressive enhancement (or graceful degradation depending on how you look at it), whereby extraneous content is only loaded when necessary, but the core functionality of the website still works. In this article, we’ll look at some of the signals that can be used for this.
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How to improve Core Web Vitals, a Smashing Magazine case study on how we detected and fixed the bottlenecks, and how we ended up with green scores, all the way.
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Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative has taken the SEO and Web Performance worlds by storm and many sites are busy optimizing their Page Experience to maximize the ranking factor. The Cumulative Layout Shift metric is causing trouble to a lot of sites, so let’s have a look at ways of addressing any issues for that metric.
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Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. If you want to use web fonts your choices are basically Flash of Invisible Text (aka FOIT) or Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT). Neither option has really “won out” because neither is really satisfactory, to be honest. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts.
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How are Core Web Vitals measured? How do you know your fixes have had the desired effect and when will you see the results in Google Search Console? Let’s figure it out! In this post, Barry Pollard is going to attempt to explain a bit more about what’s going on here and explain some of the nuances and misunderstandings of these tools.
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Thanks to some recent changes in browsers, it’s now well worth setting width and height attributes on your images to prevent layout shifts and improve the experience of your site visitors. Barry Polland loves improvements that just work without any effort required of website owners. That is not to ignore the hard work required by the browser developers and standardization teams, of course, but it’s often rolling out to websites that is the real difficulty. The less friction we can add to introduce these improvements, the more likely they will be adopted, and there’s no better friction than none at all!
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