CategoryCore Web Vitals

May 25, 2021 — Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts. Read more…

May 17, 2021 — Google’s “Page Experience Update” will start rolling out in June. At first, sites that meet Core Web Vitals thresholds will have a minor ranking advantage in mobile search for all browsers. Search is important to any business, and this is the story of how Beau Hartshorne and his team at Instant Domain Search improved their Core Web Vitals scores. Plus, an open-source tool they’ve built along the way. Read more…

April 29, 2021 — Images have also been a key part of the web. They communicate ideas instantly, but they are also a lot heavier than text to load. This means that it’s essential to get loading and displaying them right, if you want to give your users a fantastic first impression. An excerpt from Addy Osmani’s new book (also, check a free PDF preview). We’re happy and honored to have teamed up with Addy to publish a dedicated book on image optimization, and the book is now finally here! Read more…

April 19, 2021 — 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. Read more…

March 25, 2021 — How do we get media performance right while staying within performance budgets? In this article, Akshay Ranganath will take a look at the recent stats and data around performance budgets, video playback performance issues and some techniques and tools to address these issues. Having a performance budget as a standalone metric might not be of much help. That’s why we must correlate performance to organizational goals. Read more…

March 19, 2021 — Wondering what’s happenin’ at Smashing? Well, we’ve been busy. Here’s a little story of how we removed floating labels, improved performance on mobile, and launched a new series of articles. Oh, and how you can contribute to Smashing, too. Read more…

January 21, 2021 — In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Hopefully, this little case-study will be useful to you, and perhaps there are one or two techniques that you might be able to apply to your project right away. In the end, performance is all about a sum of all the fine little details, that, when added up, make or break your customer’s experience. Read more…

January 12, 2021 — Let’s make 2021… fast! An annual front-end performance checklist, with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today, from metrics to tooling and CSS/JavaScript techniques. Read more…

July 6, 2020 — From June 30th to July 2nd, Google’s web platform team brought together the web community for web.dev LIVE, a digital event to talk about the latest development to the platform and tools ecosystem, give developers a chance to talk to each other and ask their burning questions to the team. Over the three days, the Google team shared a round of updates and news in the spirit of helpfulness and to give web developers all the tools and guidance they need to keep their sites stable, powerful and accessible in these challenging times. Read more…

March 9, 2020 — 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! Read more…