Static site generators (SSGs) such as 11ty allow us to build super-fast websites with great developer experience. Hosting platforms like Netlify allow us to rapidly iterate and release directly from GitHub.| Simon Hearne
Approximately 40% of my clients have single-page applications (SPAs), and approximately 100% of my clients care about core web vitals - the key performance metrics which impact Google search ranking.| Simon Hearne
I'm currently working on a client project using Cloudflare Workers Sites. Mostly development has been a joy, the wrangler CLI is easy to use and production deployment happens in seconds.| Simon Hearne
I have been employed in web performance roles for about a decade. From load testing and synthetic monitoring to CDN configuration and true consultancy. In 2022 I became an independent web performance consultant.| Simon Hearne
Landing page hero videos are increasingly popular, especially in high fashion and luxury goods. Hero videos can have a detrimental effect on user experience though, delaying page load times and causing the page to jump around. In this post we will take an example homepage and see how we can optimise it to deliver fast, responsive videos for great UX.| Simon Hearne
View Slides| Simon Hearne
Back in 2010 Foviance ran an EEG study [1] which showed that participants had to concentrate 50% harder when websites were slow, as measured by alpha waves.| Simon Hearne
June 15th 2021: Multiple updates from Google I/O 2021, a Web Vitals Q&A session and another Google blog post.| Simon Hearne
One of the outcomes of the release of Core Web Vitals (and subsequent inclusion in Google's page ranking algorithm) is that we have been paying more attention to unexpected layout shifts and the cumulative layout shift (CLS) score.| Simon Hearne
Animated spinners are one of the lingering legacies of the 1990's web.| Simon Hearne
I wrote an article in 2019 where I predicted five top technologies for 2020. Well, 2020 was a strange year! Some things were correct though, for example the growth of JAMStack sites: the Web Almanac shows that JAMStack now powers 154% more mobile pages than in 2019!| Simon Hearne
Let's Encrypt recently announced that it is moving to using its own root certificate on January 11, 2021. This will reduce operating costs and complexity for Let's Encrypt, helping their mission to make all websites secure by default.| Simon Hearne
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In Summary #| Simon Hearne
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Now that you've got your Pi set up with Influx & Grafana, you're collecting some system stats, and measuring network performance, it's time to collect data from SmartThings!| Simon Hearne
Introduction #| Simon Hearne
View Slides| Simon Hearne
Lazy Loading Images #| Simon Hearne
I recently configured a new private WebPageTest instance on AWS to use SSL provided by Let's Encrypt, using EFF's awesome CertBot.| Simon Hearne
It has been well documented that site speed is a major factor in business success for e-commerce websites. If you can demonstrate that improving page load times by 500ms increases revenue by 5% there is a clear return on investment to make the speed improvements.| Simon Hearne
Alice Goldfuss - The Container Operator’s Manual #| Simon Hearne
Tammy Everts - Hunting the Unicorn #| Simon Hearne
Tim Kadlec - Redefining Web Performance #| Simon Hearne
View Slides| Simon Hearne
The promise of PWAs #| Simon Hearne
The site speed fallacy #| Simon Hearne
CSS image sprites can provide a performance benefit for most sites.| Simon Hearne
1) Performance KPIs are broken #| Simon Hearne
(p.s., the video of my talk on performance for low powered devices is up!)| Simon Hearne
Note: this issue has since been resolved by the Chrome team, please proceed with caution!| Simon Hearne
Do you know when your website's speed starts to impact your customers' behaviour?| Simon Hearne
Visual metrics such as Speed Index, render start and visual complete are the best proxies we have for user experience. Unfortunately two of these are totally thrown by rotating carousels, popups, cookie banners and adverts.| Simon Hearne
Bruce Lawson - web.next #| Simon Hearne
One of my favourite tasks as a consultant is to provide reports to clients which make recommendations for improving site speed. Often these reports are taken very seriously, with senior managers using them to help drive the development roadmap for the next few months.| Simon Hearne
Another post lists the talks that got five stars from me!| Simon Hearne
Here's the bookmarklet:| Simon Hearne
According to Modernizr.com, Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user's browser.| Simon Hearne
Web performance is critical to a successful online business.| Simon Hearne
We've discussed how to find the third-party assets on your site and started to look at how to mitigate the risk that they pose.| Simon Hearne
Andy Davies and I have spoken at a number of conferences about the risks that third-party components can have on your website.| Simon Hearne
I've made a Heatmap to visualise when each element loads on a page.| Simon Hearne
Getting fast is difficult, staying fast even more so. How do successful companies ensure that their site speed stays at peak?| Simon Hearne
Caching headers are surprisingly complex and often misconfigured. Here we look at some key cache scenarios and recommend the ideal headers to set.| Simon Hearne
Speed is in the eye of the beholder, it is a perception of how fast an experience feels. Optimistic UI patterns can significantly improve perceived performance for relatively little effort.| Simon Hearne
Out of the hundreds of available performance metrics, which ones make sense for you?| Simon Hearne
Core Web Vitals are three new performance metrics which will soon impact SEO ranking. Learn how to measure and improve them to maximise user experience!| Simon Hearne
Web Performance is a niche term in a broad market, should we widen our appeal to reach more people?| Simon Hearne
How to set up regular SpeedTest reports into a local InfluxDB on a Raspberry Pi| Simon Hearne
How to set up regular system stat reports from a Raspberry Pi into a local InfluxDB| Simon Hearne
I recently treated myself to a RaspberryPi 4 Model B to use as a(nother) home server. This is a brief guide on getting InfluxDB and Grafana set up to store and graph timeseries data.| Simon Hearne
An introduction to key HTTP response headers for speed and security, with implementation guides for Netlify & CloudFlare| Simon Hearne
This post is a review and summary of the talks at Velocity Europe that got a 5 star review from me. I've summarised each talk and given links to the slides, videos and ratings.| Simon Hearne
Website performance is critical to user experience. We need rules to make it easier.| Simon Hearne
Why your analytics shows your site as faster than it is, and why FCP is a key metric to optimise for.| Simon Hearne
Site speed is critical to user experience and online success, here are four charts which prove the value!| Simon Hearne
