NEW! Page bloat update, LCP misconceptions & fastest and slowest news sites
SpeedCurve
We help companies from Amazon to Zillow monitor and fix their site speed and UX – including and beyond Core Web Vitals!
In this month's edition:
Most US news sites fail to deliver optimal LCP times to mobile?
The current news cycle has many of us desperately trying to stay up to date, so mobile performance for news site is vital. The US Media Benchmark dashboard tracks the home pages of industry-leading news sites, including the New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, and NPR.
Only two of the sites – USA Today and Forbes – delivered Largest Contentful Paint times – on a 'slow' mobile connection – that were within Google's threshold of 2.5 seconds. On a more positive note, a handful of sites did start to render within 2 seconds.
What did the faster pages have in common? Lean images that were served quickly and early in the critical rendering path. For example, on the USA Today home page, which had a Start Render time of 1.1 seconds and an LCP time of 2.2 seconds, the LCP image is the fourth request (out of a total of 564 requests).
Slower pages served the LCP element much later. On one page, which had an LCP time of almost 18 seconds, the LCP element was the 97th resource request (out of 434 requests) 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.
Six things that slow down your site's UX (and why you have no control over them)
If you work in tech, you might be shocked to learn that the average person uses their tech very differently than you. Here are some eye-opening statistics to help you understand the full breadth of your users' experience when they visit your site.
Page bloat update: How does ever-increasing page size affect your business and your users?
Performance expert Tammy Everts 's annual dive into the HTTP Archive focuses on page growth, web performance, and user experience. Some interesting findings:
There's lots more analysis in the post. As the table above shows, there's a major gap between where pages should be and where they actually are.
The law of diminishing returns
Geoff Graham gives us a much-needed reminder of how useful our efforts as design, development, UX, SEO, and data folks can be... until we hit the point of diminishing returns:
Definitely a fun read, with lots of links to more fun reads.
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Common misconceptions about how to optimize LCP?
"The median site with poor LCP spends almost four times as long waiting to start downloading the LCP image as it does actually downloading it, waiting 1.3 seconds between TTFB and image request. That's more than half of the 2.5 second LCP budget gone in a single subpart."
What does that mean in practical terms? It means you need to look beyond optimizing image size (which is still a good best practice) and consider how to reduce – and even eliminate – resource load delay. Fortunately, Brendan Kenny has included some good advice along with this analysis.
Best practices for optimizing images
Further to the above... are your beautiful images hurting your page speed and tanking your UX? This quick guide to image optimization covers:
Fast and smooth third-party web fonts?
Scott Jehl shares?a font-loading technique that gives the best of two worlds: load the font files asynchronously while the page renders, while still hiding the text to give the font time to load.
This is a great, detailed walkthrough for anyone who wants to deliver faster third-party fonts without any annoying FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text).
Glossary of web performance metrics
Are you up to speed on current web performance metrics, including Core Web Vitals??Do you know which browsers do NOT support various metrics??How about SPAs?? This glossary of popular metrics might contain a few surprises for you!?
In case you missed it...