Getting started with Web Performance 🚀
As the murderous tortoises start to converge on Ryūji’s hideout, they pull out their phone. It’s a cheap, older device but it’s survived the toils of the tortoise-ageddon well so far. Thankfully the internet still exists, although a bit slower, so they’re able to search online for how to scare tortoises away. The first result looks promising so they quickly tap through to find the information they need. But as the loading bar moves at barely a crawl, Ryūji realises with horror that this website is loading far too slowly—20 seconds have passed and it’s still just a white screen! They look up and realise they’ve run out of time, poor website performance was Ryūji’s downfall.
As Ryūji discovered, web performance really matters, and is about making websites fast. I hope that most of us don’t encounter as drastic circumstances as they have! For the rest of us a well performing website is more accessible to people, offers a more enjoyable experience, and may even encourage more views, shares or sales.
But web performance is also quite tricky! Let us go through some of the reasoning, jargon, metrics, tools, and some top tips on how you can improve the performance of websites you look after. Whether you’re a practised performance prophet, dipping your toes into the river of load times, or are desperately hoping someone will explain what an FCP is and why Google wants one, let’s all dig into web performance together!
