This is a list of sources I personally found useful to learn about web performance. I keep this list up to date and add new great resources often. If you know great resources which aren’t covered here please create a pull request.
- Stay up to date
- Articles
- Online courses
- Videos
- Books
- Podcasts
- Tools
- Open Source Projects
- Studies
- Case studies
- Open data sources
- Web Performance Meetups
- Conferences
- W3C Standards
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Planet Performance Overview of performance related blogs
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Dev Tips, Umar Hansa, weekly Great resource to learn the newest Chrome Dev Tools tips and tricks
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Twitter: #webperf, #perfmatters
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This Web Performance Twitter-List makes it easy for you to follow all the web performance authors, speakers, and evangelists at once
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Web performance Slack channel Slack channel which is focusing on web performance with more than 750 members
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The speed of thought - Posts from the Performance Team at Wikimedia
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Perf.email by Calibre, The newsletter contains mainly web performance articles which are not directly connected with their product. Therefore I can recommend to follow it.
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Smashing Magazine Newsletter This is not a Web Performance only Newsletter
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Web performance newsletter weekly web performance newsletter by Marc Radziwill
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WebPerf Working Group Meetings, Understand what topics are discussed and be prepared for what is coming in the future
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Everything we know about Core Web Vitals and SEO, Simon Hearne, 02/2021
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Site Speed and Search Ranking (Complete Guide), Ben Schwarz, 02/2021
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Finally – a way to calculate revenue impact of site speed, Lina Hansson, 01/2021
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Blood pressure study: Which website issue cause users the most stress?, Robin Langford, 12/2020
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Understanding Emotion for Happy Users – How does your site make your users feel?, Philip Tellis, 11/2020
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Strengthening the Link Between Site Speed and Business Outcomes, Andy Davies, 10/2020
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Why you should be testing your 404 pages web performance, Matt Hobbs, 08/2020
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The Need for Speed, 23 Years Later, Kathryn Whitenton, 05/2020
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Evaluating page experience for a better web, Sowmya Subramanian, 05/2020
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Front-End Performance Checklist 2020, Vitaly Friedman (Smashing Magazine), 01/2020
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We analyzed 5.2 million desktop and mobile pages - Here’s What We Learned About Page Speed, Brian Dean, 10/2019
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How Web Content Can Affect Power Usage, Benjamin Poulain & Simon Fraser, 08/2019
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Web Page Usability Matters, Addy Osmani, 01/2019
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Front-End Performance Checklist 2019, Vitaly Friedman, 01/2019
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You need neither PWA nor AMP to make your website load fast, Nikita, 11/2018
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The very real problem facing British retailers that nobody is talking about, Ryan Townsend, 11/2018
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Brain Food: Speed Matters: Designing for mobile performance (PDF), AWWWARDS & Google, 2018
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Start performance budgeting, Addy Osmani, 10/2018
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Web Performance 101: JS, CSS, HTTP, images & fonts, Ivan Akulov, 10/2018
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Hyper-Lightweight Websites Challenge (PDF) / Toronto SPOTLIGHT PERFORMANCE talk, Chris Zacharias, 10/2018
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The power of progressive enhancement, Andy Bell, 08/2018
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Optimize Website Speed With Chrome DevTools, Kayce Basques, 07/2018
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Speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search and Ads, Ilya Grigorik, Addy Osmani, 07/2018
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How to create the best experience for every user with the newest web APIs, Fabian Krumbholz, 06/2018
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15+ Experts Share Their Web Performance Advice for 2018, Cody Arsenault, 06/2018
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Fostering a Web Performance Culture, José M. Pérez, 06/2018
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A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization, Mark Gavalda, 05/2018
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Delivering Fast and Light Applications with Save-Data, Ilya Grigroik, 01/2018
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Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets, Alex Russell, 10/2017
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The State of the Web — A guide to impactful performance improvements, Karolina Szczur, 09/2017
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What is Progressive Enhancement and why should you care?, Tiffany Tse, 02/2017
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Making websites that work well on Opera Mini, Bruce Lawson, 06/2015
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Perf Audits for Blink & DevTools, CNet, Wikipedia, Time, Paul Irish, 02/2015
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My Performance Audit Workflow, Paul Lewis, 04/2014
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Prefetching Heuristics, Minko Gechev, 02/2021
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Head-of-Line Blocking in QUIC and HTTP/3: The Details, Robin Marx, 12/2020
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Back/forward cache, Philip Walton, 11/2020
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Intent to Remove: HTTP/2 and gQUIC server push, Chromium, 11/2020
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The Performance Cost of EV Certificates, Simon Hearne, 11/2020
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Who Opts-in to Save-data?, Simon Hearne, 10/2020
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Improve performance by using a content delivery network, Katie Hempenius, 09/2020
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Measuring and examining TLS 1.3, IPv4, and IPv6 performance, Matt Hobbs, 07/2020
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EV Certificates Make The Web Slow and Unreliable, Aaron Peters, 01/2020
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The impact of SSL certificate revocation on web performance, Matt Hobbs, 01/2020
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How to Test DNS Server Response Time to Troubleshoot Site Speed, Jenni McKinnon ,11/2019
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Three Ways of Checking Rel=preconnect Resource Hints Are Working, Andy Davies, 04/2019
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Preconnect resource hint and the crossorigin attribute, Michael Crenshaw, 04/2019
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Cache-Control for Civilians, Harry Roberts, 03/2019
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TTFB optimization: a guide to enhanced performance, Stephan Becker, 03/2019
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Preloading Fonts and the Puzzle of Priorities, Andy Davies, 02/2019
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QUIC and HTTP/3 : Too big to fail?!, Robin Marx, 12/2018
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All about prefetching, Katie Hempenius, 12/2018
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Measuring Performance With Server Timing, Drew McLellan, 10/2018
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Service Worker Caching Strategies Based on Request Types, Thomas Steiner, 08/2018
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Dynamic resources using the Network Information API and service workers, Dean Hume, 07/2018
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Connection-Aware Components, Max Böck, 07/2018
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To push or not to push, Patrick Hamann, 06/2018
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Towards ever faster websites with early hints and priority hints, Andrew Betts, 06/2018
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Brotli Compression – How Much Will It Reduce Your Content?, Paul Calvano, 07/2018
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What is HTTP/2 — The Ultimate Guide, Ali Raza, 04/2018
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Resource Hints — What is Preload, Prefetch, and Preconnect?, Brian Jackson, 01/2018
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HTTP Caching, Ilya Grigorik, 01/2018
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A Comprehensive Guide To HTTP/2 Server Push, Jeremy Wagner, 04/2017
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A Link: rel=preload Analysis From the Chrome Data Saver Team, Simon Pelchat, 03/2017
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What is the preload directive?, 01/2017
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Caching best practices & max-age gotchas, Jake Archibald, 2016
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HTTP/2 Push: The details, Robin Marx, 12/2016
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The 14KB In The TCP Initial Window, Tyler Cipriani, 09/2016
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How DNS works (Comic)
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Time for Next-Gen Codecs to Dethrone JPEG, Jon Sneyers, 02/2020
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Maximally optimizing image loading for the web in 2021, Malte Ubl, 12/2020
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Native image lazy-loading for the web, Houssein Djirdeh, Addy Osmani, Mathias Bynens, 07/2020
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How JPEG XL Compares to Other Image Codecs, Jon Sneyers, 05/2020
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AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding, Netflix Technology Blog, 02/2020
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In-Browser Performance Linting With Feature Policies, Tim Kadlec, 02/2020
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Visual acuity and device-pixel-ratio, Eric Portis, 03/2019
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Video Playback On The Web: The Current State Of Video, Doug Sillars, 10/2018
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Video Playback On The Web: Video Delivery Best Practices, Doug Sillars, 10/2018
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Automating Resource Selection with Client Hints, Ilya Grigorik, 07/2018
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Image Inconsistencies: How and When Browsers Download Images, Harry Roberts, 06/2018
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Essential Image Optimization, Addy Osmani, 2017
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Using SVG as placeholders — More Image Loading Techniques, José M. Pérez, 10/2017
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Base64 Encoding & Performance, Part 2: Gathering Data, Harry Roberts, 02/2017
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Base64 Encoding & Performance, Part 1: What’s Up with Base64?, Harry Roberts, 02/2017
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Improving Perceived Performance with Multiple Background Images, Harry Roberts, 10/2016
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How Medium does progressive image loading, José M. Pérez, 10/2015
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Responsive Images 101, Jason Grigsby, 03/2015
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Cloudflare Worker recipes for frontend performance testing, Matt Hobbs, 03/2021
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Measuring Network Performance in Mobile Safari, Harry Roberts, 02/2021
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An Opinionated Guide to Performance Budgets, Tammy Everts, 02/2021
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How to run a WebPageTest test, Matt Hobbs, 12/2020
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Strategies for Telemetry Exfiltration (aka Beaconing In Practice), Nic Jansma, 12/2020
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Analyzing Web Vitals with WebPageTest, Patrick Meenan, 12/2020
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On Cadence, Cohorts and Trained Behavior, Tobias Baldauf, 12/2020
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Site-Speed Topography, Harry Roberts, 11/2020
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How to Improve Core Web Vitals, Simon Hearne, 10/2020
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Cumulative Layout Shift in Practice, Nic Jansma, 10/2020
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Cumulative Layout Shift in the Real World, Nic Jansma, 10/2020
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Defining the Core Web Vitals metrics thresholds, Bryan McQuade, 05/2020
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The Science Behind Web Vitals, Amar Sagoo / Annie Sullivan / Vivek Sekhar, 05/2020
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Measuring Performance behind consent popups, Simon Hearne, 05/2020
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Performance Budgets, Pragmatically, Harry Roberts, 01/2020
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How to read a WebPageTest Connection View chart, Matt Hobbs, 12/2019
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How to read a WebPageTest Waterfall View chart, Matt Hobbs, 10/2019
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Lighthouse Variability, 2019
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Metrics - Measure and optimize performance and user experience, 2019
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Largest Contentful Paint, Philip Walton, 08/2019
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Time to First Byte: What It Is and Why It Matters, Harry Roberts, 08/2019
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Web Page Usability Matters, Addy Osmani, 01/2019
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Metrics from 1M sites, Steve Souders, 12/2018
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Second Meaningful Content: the Worst Performance Metric, Scott Jehl, 11/2018
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The Three Types of Performance Testing, Harry Roberts, 10/2018
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Applying Waterfall Visualizations to Real User Monitoring Data, Simon Hearne, 10/2018
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An analysis of Chromium's paint timing metrics, Joseph Wynn, 09/2018
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Accurately measuring layout on the web, Nolan Lawson, (09/2018)
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A step by step guide to monitoring the competition with the Chrome UX Report, Rick Viscomi, 09/2018
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How to track performance, U.S. Web Design System, 07/2018
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Assessing Loading Performance in Real Life with Navigation and Resource Timing, Jeremy Wagner, 06/2018
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User Timing API (Custom Timing): the most relevant performance measure ever, Damien Jubeau, 03/2018
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Server Timing in the Wild, Christopher Sidebottom, 03/2018
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Is a High Abandon Rate Hitting Your Online Marketing Budget?, Fabian Krumbholz, 03/2018
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ResourceTiming Visibility: Third-Party Scripts, Ads and Page Weight, Nic Jansma, 03/2018
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Measure Performance with the RAIL Model, Addy Osmani, 02/2018
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User-centric Performance Metrics, Philip Walton, 02/2018
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An Audit of Boomerang’s Performance, Nic Jansma, 12/2017
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Choosing the Correct Average, Harry Roberts, 01/2017
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User Timing and Custom Metrics, Steve Souders, 11/2015
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Conversion Impact Score: What is it? And why do you need to know yours?, Tammy Everts, 07/2015
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Driving WebPagetest from a Google Docs Spreadsheet, Andy Davies, 12/2014
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Understanding the True Cost of Client-Side A/B Testing, Tim Kadlec, 01/2021
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Reducing the Site-Speed Impact of Third-Party Tags, Andy Davies, 10/2020
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The Case Against Anti-Flicker Snippets, Andy Davies, 11/2020
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Self-Host Your Static Assets, Harry Roberts, 05/2019
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How we shaved 1.7 seconds off casper.com by self-hosting Optimizely, Kyle Rush, 08/2018
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Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking, Nick Nguyen, 08/2018
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When 3rd parties stop being polite … and start getting real, Charles Vazac & Nic Jansma, 06/2018
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Identifying, Auditing, and Discussing Third Parties, Harry Roberts, 05/2018
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Crashing the (Third) Party, Oleg Zender, 06/2018
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Collection of articles about 3rd party, Trend Walton
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How 3rd Party Scripts can be performant citizens on the web, Ryan Townsend, 08/2017
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Performance and Resilience: Stress-Testing Third Parties, Harry Roberts, 07/2017
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Discover how Adidas is using data science to deliver third-party governance, Kristian Sköld, 11/2016
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How A/B testing tools worsen your site speed (study), OrangeValley, 04/2016
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10 pro tips for managing the performance of your third-party scripts, Tammy Everts, 11/2015
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The importance of
@font-face
source order when used with preload, Matt Hobbs, 01/2021 -
How to avoid layout shifts caused by web fonts, Simon Hearne, 01/2021
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The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously, Scott Jehl, 07/2019
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Measuring the Critical Rendering Path, Ilya Grigorik, 12/2018
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Inlining or Caching? Both Please!, Scott Jehl, 11/2018
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CSS and Network Performance, Harry Roberts, 11/2018
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The font loading checklist, Zach Leatherman, 08/2018
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Analyzing Critical Rendering Path Performance, Ilya Grigorik, 08/2018
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Front-End Performance Checklist, 2018, GitHub Project with updates
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The PRPL Pattern, Addy Osmani, 02/2018
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Now You See Me: How To Defer, Lazy-Load And Act With IntersectionObserver, Denys Mishunov, 01/2018
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Optimising the front end for the browser, Sanjay Purswani, 02/2017
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A comprehensive guide to font loading strategies, Zach Leatherman, 07/2016
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Understanding the critical rendering path, rendering pages in 1 second, Luis Vieira, 06/2015
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More Weight Doesn’t Mean More Wait, Scott Jehl, 04/2015
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JavaScript performance beyond bundle size, Nolan Lawson, 02/2021
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The Import On Interaction Pattern, Addy Osmani, 12/2020
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Prevent layout shifts with CSS grid stacks, Hubert Sablonnière, 10/2020
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content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance, Una Kravets, Vladimir Levin, 08/2020
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The Cost of Javascript Frameworks, Tim Kadlec, 04/2020
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Fixing memory leaks in web applications, Nolan Lawson, 02/2020
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How to load polyfills only when needed, Ivan Akulov, 02/2020
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Responsible JavaScript: Part III - Third parties, Jeremy Wagner, 11/2019
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When should you be using Web Workers?, Surma, 06/2019
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Responsible Javascript: Part II - Code Bundle, Jeremy Wagner, 06/2019
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Faster script loading with BinaryAST?, Ingvar Stepanyan, 05/2019
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Svelte 3: Rethinking reactivity, Rich Harris, 04/2019
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Responsible Javascript: Part I - Web platform over frameworks, Jeremy Wagner, 03/2019
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JavaScript Loading Priorities in Chrome, Addy Osmani, 02/2019
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Idle Until Urgent, Philip Walton, 09/2018
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Browser painting and considerations for web performance, Georgy Marchuk, 08/2018
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The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018 (Video), Addy Osmani, 08/2018
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Examining Web Worker Performance, James L Milner, 05/2018
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Front-End Performance Checklist, 2018, GitHub Project with updates
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jankfree, Website which collects resources about render performance
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What forces layout/reflow?, Paul Irish
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Using requestIdleCallback, Paul Lewis, 01/2018
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Optimize Javascript Execution, Paul Lewis, 01/2018
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Why Web Developers Need to Care about Interactivity, Philip Walton, 12/2017
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Improving Performance with the Paint Timing API, Umar Hansa, 10/2017
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Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today, Philip Walton, 09/2017
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Performant Web Animations and Interactions: Achieving 60 FPS, Emily Hayman, 08/2017
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JavaScript Start-up Performance, Addy Osmani, 02/2017
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Performant Parallaxing, Paul Lewis, 12/2016
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The Anatomy of a Frame, Paul Lewis, 02/2016
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The future of loading CSS, Jake Archibald, 02/2016
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4 Types of Memory Leaks in JavaScript and How to Get Rid Of Them, Sebastián Peyrott, 01/2016
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The cost of frameworks, Paul Lewis, 11/2015
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FLIP Your Animations, Paul Lewis, 02/2015
This is all about how humans perceive performance and what we can do to help our users to keep focused:
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Optimistic UI Patterns for Improved Perceived Performance, Simon Hearne, 01/2021
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Everything you need to know about skeleton screens, Bill Chung, 10/2018
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The psychology of web performance, 06/2018
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The Illusion of Time, Adrian Zumbrunnen, 08/2015
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Why Performance Matters: The Perception Of Time, Denys Mishunov, 09/2015
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Why Performance Matters, Part 2: Perception Management, Denys Mishunov, 11/2015
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Why Performance Matters, Part 3: Tolerance Management, Denys Mishunov, 12/2015
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True Lies Of Optimistic User Interfaces, Denys Mishunov, 11/2016
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Taking A Look At The State Of Progressive Images And User Perception, José Manuel Pérez, 02/2018
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Exploring Site Speed Optimisations With WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers, Andy Davies, 09/2020
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Prototyping optimizations with Cloudflare Workers and WebPageTest, Andrew Galloni, 08/2020
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Cloudflare Workers, Pat Meenan Collection of Cloudflare Worker scripts, generally focused on performance optimizations
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Chrome Flags for Tooling, Paul Irish
These are excellent courses for web developer to gain a lot of insights about web performance.
- web.dev, Google, 11/2018
- Udacity: Website Performance Optimization by Google (free) This course is great to start. You will learn how the browser works internally and how you can optimise the critical render path.
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Lightning-Fast Web Performance, Scott Jehl, 05/2020 This course is great for Frontend Developers who are interested in web performance. Scott introduces the most relevant web performance metrics and shows the most effective ways how to optimize them in great detail. The course contains also a lot of good references which can be used to dive deeper into the topic.
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Frontend Masters: Web Performance, Steve Kinney, 03/2018 ($39 / monthly subscription) This is the go to course for Frontend Developers. This course is going really deep into Javascript Performance and Rendering Performance. I recommend this for more senior developers.
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Pluralsight: Tracking Real World Web Performance, Nik Molnar, 05/2015 ($29 / monthly subscription) Nice introduction into web performance measurement.
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Modern Dev Tools, Umar Hansa, 05/2017 ($94) Umar is a Chrome Developer Tools expert and explains all the tools you need to understand and fix web performance issues.
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Frontend Center, Glen Maddern, ($15/monthly subscription) Not 100% related to Web Performance. A few of the trainings are available for free.
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devcademy - Web performance workshop, Marc Radziwill, 08/2020 (299€ - 750€)
This is a great free introduction into web performance. Ilya Grigorik from Google is covering everything from network, the critical render path and in-app performance. It is from 2013 but it is still highly relevant.
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Critical rendering path (41:10)
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Delivering 60 FPS in the browser (48:15)
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From Milliseconds to Millions: A Look at the Numbers Driving Web Performance (Slides), Harry Roberts, 11/2019
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Performance Teams (Slides), Tammy Everts, 11/2019
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7 Years of Never Shutting Up About Site Speed (Schuh case study) (Slides), Stuart McMillan, 11/2019
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PWA Challenges (Slides), Jason Grigsby, 11/2018 – Performance.now()
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Building a Foundation for Performance, Michelle Vu, 11/2018 – Performance.now()
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Starting a Dedicated Web Performance Team, Sarah Dapul-Weberman, 06/2018
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Web Performance @ NBrown, Nick Webb & Laura Sheridan, 06/2018
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Fast Fashion: Missguided (Slides), Mark Leach & Andy Davies, 06/2018
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25% Faster Hotel Search. Web Performance? — Trivago, Tobias Baldauf, 06/2018
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Conversions@Google 2018, Luke Wroblewski, 05/2018
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On Building Performance for the Long Term (Slides), Allison McKnight, 02/2018
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Building for Billions, Tal Oppenheimer, 06/2016
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Making a business case for web performance optimization, Kristian Sköld, 04/2016
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Performance Budget, Tim Kadlec, 04/2015
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Deep dive into third-party performance (Slides), Simon Hearne, 11/2019
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It’s My (Third) Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To (Slides), Harry Roberts, 11/2018
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Name That Script (Slides), Trent Walton, 04/2018
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A/B Testing, Ads and other 3rd Party Tags (Slides), Andy Davies, 02/2018
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3rd Parties: A Hate Love Who Wants to be Managed, Kristian Sköld, 12/2017
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What are third party components doing to your site?, Andy Davies/Simon Hearne, 06/2015
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Stranger Danger: Tracking Vulnerabilities in Your Third Party Code, Guy Podjarny, 2015
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Third Party Performance, Guy Podjarny, 04/2015
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The Psychology of Speed, Simon Hearne, 10/2020
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Designing for Speed & Hacking Users Perception, Mustafa Kurtuldu, 04/2019
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Cheating the UX when there is nothing more to optimize (Slides), Stephanie Walter, 01/2018
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O’Reilly Safaribooksonline: Perceived Performance: The Only Kind that Really Matters (Slides), Eli Fitch, 11/2017 (34$ / monthly subscription) This is a really good talk about how humans perceive performance. Eli shares a lot of good tips and tricks how you can improve the perceived performance.
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Deconstructing Performance, Denys Mishunov, 01/2016 The content of this talk is similar to Eli Fitch’s talk, but less technical.
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List of YouTube videos about QUIC/HTTP3, Robin Marx
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Data-s(h)aver strategies, Tim Vereecke, 11/2019
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HTTP/3 - HTTP over QUIC is the next generation, Daniel Stenberg, 09/2019
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More Than You Wanted to Know About Resource Hints, Harry Roberts, 06/2019
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Resource loading, prioritization, HTTP/2 - oh my! - PerfMatters (Slides / Slides from Tutorial), Patrick Meenan, 05/2019
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Building Faster, More Resilient Apps with Service Worker (Chrome Dev Summit 2018), Phil Walton/Ewa Gasperowicz, 11/2018
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Headers for Hackers (Slides, Article: Headers we want, Article: Headers we don't want), Andrew Betts, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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Fun with Protocols, Natasha Rooney, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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Take a (Client) Hint (Slides), (Code), Jeremy Wagner, 09/2018 - FullStack Fest Conference
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QUIC: in Theory and Practice, Slides, Robin Marx, 06/2018
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HTTP/2 101, Surma, 11/2015 Nice introduction to HTTP2
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Yesterday’s perf best-practices are today’s HTTP/2 anti-patterns, Ilya Grigorik, 06/2015
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WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers – A Performance Consultant’s Dream Combo?, Andy Davies, 20/2020
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Optimize for Core Web Vitals, Addy Osmani, 06/2020
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Lessons learned from performance monitoring in Chrome (Slides), Annie Sullivan, 11/2019
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How website speed can impact digital ad revenue (Slides), Simon Hearne, 06/2019
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Crash Course in CrUX, Slides, Rick Viscomi, 04/2018 - perfmatters
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The Latest in Metrics & Measurement, Paul Irish, 11/2018 – Performance.now()
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How I learned to stop worrying and love UX metrics (Slides), Tammy Everts, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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User Experience & Performance: Metrics that Matter, Slides, Philip Tellis, 10/2018
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Chrome User Experience Report, Inian Parameshwaran, 06/2018
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How Fast Is It?, Slides, Patrick Meenan, 02/2018
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How’s the UX on the Web, Really?, Ilya Grigorik, 02/2018
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Reliably Measuring Responsiveness in the Wild, Shubhie Panicker/Nic Jansma, 07/2017
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Web Performance: Leveraging the Metrics that Most Affect User Experience, Shubhie Panicker/Philip Walton, 05/2017
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Measuring Continuity, Philip Tellis/Nic Jansma, 07/2016
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Using Machine Learning to Determine Drivers of Bounce and Conversion, Tammy Everts/Patrick Meenan, 07/2016
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Forensic Tools for In-Depth Performance Investigations, Philip Tellis/Nic Jansma, 06/2016
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Visualizing performance data in engaging ways, Mark Zeman, 06/2015
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Speed tooling evolutions: 2019 and beyond, Elizabeth Sweeny & Paul Irish, 11/2019
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Demystifying Speed Tooling (Google I/O ’19), Elizabeth Sweeny & Paul Irish & Amir Rachum, 05/2019
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State of the Union for Speed Tooling (Chrome Dev Summit 2018), Elizabeth Sween/Paul Irish, 11/2018
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What’s new in Chrome Dev Tools, Paul Irish, 05/2018
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The power of Headless Chrome and browser automation, Eric Bidelman, 05/2018
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Use Lighthouse and Chrome UX Report to optimize web app performance, 05/2018 Use the new Lighthouse API to integrate it into the Jenkins pipeline.
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A Modern Front-End Workflow with DevTools, Umar Hansa, 02/2018
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Charles Proxy, Willow Talk, 01/2016
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Developer’s Toolbox: What is Charles and why would I want it?, Team Learnable, 05/2014
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SVG Will Save Us, Sarah Drasner, 04/2019, perfmatters
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Building Modern Web Media Experiences: Picture-in-Picture and AV1 (Chrome Dev Summit 2018), François Beaufort/Angie Chiang, 11/2018
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Image Optimization, Kornel Lesiński, 11/2018 – Performance.now()
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Beyond the Basics of Image Optimization — (Slides), Una Kravets/Martin Splitt, 02/2018
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Your Hero Images Need You! Save the Day with HTTP2 Image Loading, Tobias Baldauf, 04/2016
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High Performance Images: Beautiful Shouldn’t Mean Slow, Guy Podjarny, 12/2015
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Transitioning to modern JavaScript (Article), Houssein Djirdeh, Jason Miller, Chrome Dev Summit 2020, 12/2020
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When JavaScript Bytes (Slides), Tim Kadlec, 11/2019
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Adaptive Loading — Improving the UX for millions on low-end devices, Addy Osmany, 11/2019
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Predictive Prefetching (Slides), Divya Sasidhara, 11/2019
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WebAssembly – To the browser and beyond! (Slides), Patrick Hamann, 11/2019
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The main thread is overworked & underpaid, Surma, 11/2019
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Speed at Scale: Web Performance Tips and Tricks from the Trenches (Google I/O ’19), Addy Osmani & Katie Hempenius, 05/2019
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Rendering on the Web: Performance Implications of Application Architecture (Google I/O ’19), Jason Miller & Houssein Djirdeh , 05/2019
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A Quest to Guarantee Responsiveness: Scheduling On and Off the Main Thread (Chrome Dev Summit 2018), Shubhie Panicker/Jason Miller, 11/2018
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Speed Essentials: Key Techniques for Fast Websites (Chrome Dev Summit 2018), Katie Hempenius/Houssein Djirdeh, 11/2018
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Raiders of the Fast Start: Frontend Perf Archeology (Slides), Katie Sylor-Miller, 11/2018 - Performance.now() Conference
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The Long Tail of Performance (Slides), Tim Kadlec, 11/2018 - Performance.now() Conference
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Optimizing Fonts (Slides), Zach Leatherman, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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How I optimized my JavaScript sheet music rendering engine, Adrian Holovaty, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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Debugging UI Performance Issues (Slides), Anna Migas, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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Make JavaScript Faster (Slides), Steve Souders, 11/2018 – Performance.now() Conference
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Schedule your animations like a pro – with requestAnimationFrame, Paul Lewis, 09/2018
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Frontend Resilience (Slides), Ian Feather, 06/2018
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There's more to Performance than meets the Eye, Léonie Watson, 06/2018, Delta Conference
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The Event Loop, Jake Archibald, 02/2018 – W3C Spec Event Loop
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Performant Animations: Hitting 60fps, Emily Hayman, 02/2018
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Resource Loading — Past, Present & Future (Slides), Yoav Weiss, 02/2018
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Web Fonts are ▢▢▢ Rocket Science (Zach’s lenghty article), Zach Leatherman, 02/2018
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Front End Center: Caching & CDNs, 10/2017
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Fast By Default: Modern Loading Best Practices, Addi Osmani/Ilya Grigorik, 10/2017
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Front End Center: Why Latency Matters: Foundations of Web Performance, 08/2017
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Creating UX that “Just Feels Right” with Progressive Web Apps, Owen Campbell-Moore, 05/2017
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Solving the Web Performance Crisis, Nolan Lawson, 01/2017
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Solving the Web Performance Crisis, Nolan Lawson, 01/2017
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Planning for Performance: PRPL, Sam Saccone, 11/2016
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AMP: Does it Really Make Your Site Faster?, Nic Jansma, Nigel Heron, 11/2016
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UI Elements at 60fps, Paul Lewis, 06/2016
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Owning your performance: RAIL, Paul Irish, 11/2015
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HTTP2 and Front-End Performance, Mark Nottingham, 05/2015
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performance.now().reject(reasons) (Slides), Ilya Grigorik, 11/2019
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A Decade of Disciplined Delivery (Slides), Henri Helvetica, 11/2019
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The Future of Performance (Slides), Vitaly Friedman, 11/2019
This are the books I read about web performance and I can highly recommend all of them:
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Going Offline, Jeremy Keith, A Book Apart, 04/2018
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High Performance Images, Colin Bendell/Tim Kadlec/Yoav Weiss/Guy Podjarny/Nick Doyle/Mike McCall, O’Reilly, 11/2016 This book goes really deep and will answer you all the questions you could possible ask about images.
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Time is money, Tammy Everts, O’Reilly, 06/2016 This book is great to understand why performance matters and how it influences human behaviour and your business metrics. I recommend this book highly for Business Consultants.
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Using WebPageTest, Rick Viscomi/Andy Davies/Marcel Duran, O’Reilly, 10/2015 This book gives a deep insight into WebPageTest. You will learn a lot of things you wouldn’t find out reading this book.
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Designing for Performance, Lara Callender Hogan, O’Reilly, 12/2014
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Responsible Responsive Design, Scott Jehl, A Book Apart, 11/2014
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High Performance Browser Networking, Ilya Grigorik, O’Reilly, 09/2013 (free) This book is a must read. If you are serious about web performance you have to understand the network layer. This book will teach you what you need to know.
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High Performance Web Sites, Steve Souders, O’Reilly, 09/2007 This book is a classic.
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Even Faster Web Sites, Steve Souders, O’Reilly, 07/2009 Another classic book.
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Pagespeed Compare Compare performance metrics of your pages against each other or your competitors using Google PageSpeed Insights.
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Lighthouse Lighthouse is becoming the best audit tool for web performance. It has a great documentation and gives valuable insights. This is where my performance audit is starting.
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Lighthouse Parade A Node.js command line tool that crawls a domain and compiles a report with lighthouse performance data for every page.
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Yellow Lab Tools Online test to help speeding up heavy web pages: Frontend Quality, WebPerf, JS Profiling
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WebPageTest Make synthetic measurements from all over the world. Make performance audits of any website. This tool is very powerful and gives you a lot of insights. I use it a lot to make a website comparison video.
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WebPageTest comparison URL generator Compare multiple webpagetest results which each other. Nice tool to see filmstrips site by site.
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Frustration Index "The gap between metrics is a better KPI for user experience" - FRUSTRATIONindex looks at the gap between metrics instead of looking at them individually. The bigger the gap the bigger the chance a user gets frustrated.
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Request Map Generator The Request Map Generator is the go to place to understand what 3rd party tools are running on your page and how much data they are adding.
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Lighthouse Scoring Calculator: Learn how the Lighthouse Score is calculated for the last two versions. This helps to understand where changes are comming from if your score changes.
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Lighthouse Scores from around the world: Global performance insights, powered by Lighthouse. Lighthouse Metrics provides easy insights for your site's performance. Save your time by running tests from multiple locations to get the valuable insight you need.
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Layout Shift GIF Generator: Visualise the Core Web Vitals metric Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) with a simple GIF.
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SpeedChecklist A checklist which shows you how to optimise web performance issues you might have. You find best practices for the most common problems described in great detail.
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Chrome Developer Tools This is the go to tool for all web developers. Understand how your code gets loaded, parsed and rendered.
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Image Analyser Image analysis tool. This tool gives you insight about how you can optimise your images to gain a better web performance. This tool is also integrated within webpagetest.org.
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Responsive Image Breakpoints Generator v2.0 Easily generate the optimal responsive image dimensions
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Web Performance Budget Calculator Create your own budget based on httparchive data of millions of pages. Download it as an json file for Lighthouse Web Performance Budget.
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3P web, Shows the impact of Third-Party Tools based on HTTP Archive data.
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What does my site cost How much does it cost for your users to download your page? In many countries the majority of the users are on a pre paid data plan.
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spof-o-matic Chrome extension for detecting and simulating frontend Single Points Of Failure
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Slowfiles, Harry Roberts & Ryan Townsend Simulate slow loading JS and CSS files.
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CSS Triggers Which CSS element trigger layout, paint, or composite?
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BundlePhobia Find the cost of adding a npm package to your bundle
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EStimator Find out how much turning on modern JS could save.
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Source Map Explorer, Webpack Bundle Analyer Understand what code you are loading
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Ghostery See what 3rd party tools are loaded on a site.
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https://better.fyi/trackers/ Nice list of 3rd party trackers with detailed information, for example about how to block the service. Which comes in handy when you want to measure the impact of a tool.
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ImageOptim Image compression
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Squoosh Upload an image and compare the original with different compressed version to find a good balance between filesize and image quality.
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Can I use? Check the browser support for every web technology.
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Browser Scope Browserscope is a community-driven project for profiling web browsers. The goals are to foster innovation by tracking browser functionality and to be a resource for web developers.
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JS Manners I like this page to audit JS Frameworks and 3rd party tools.
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Webbkoll This tool helps you check what data-protecting measures a site has taken to help you exercise control over your privacy.
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You might not need Javascript Don’t use Javascript for things where it is not really needed. This website shows you to do stuff with CSS: Slider, Modal, Scroll Indicator, Navigation, Tabs, Accordion
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You might not need jQuery Learn how to get rid of jQuery dependencies in your project. This page shows you how to achieve things with Vanilla Javascript.
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Cloud Ping See the network latency from your location to all AWS centres in the work.
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Charles Web Debugging Proxy (free/$50) The proxy sits between your browser and the internet and lets you monitor and alter all the network traffic. I use it mainly for network throttling and request blocking.
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har.tech Collection of tools which can be used to inspect HAR files.
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httpstat.us Service which responds which all kind of http error codes. With this service you can check how your app or website reacts when 3rd party services are responding with an error.
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https://httpstatus.io/ Service which shows status codes, latency, response headers and more from the URL you submit. This is great to check for redirects and other network related issues.
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DNS Perf DNS Speed Benchmark: Test the performance of your DNS provider from all over the world using this benchmark tool
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DNS Speed Test The DNS hosting speed tool will give you valuable DNS performance information for each level in the DNS tree to assist with performance evaluations and performance troubleshooting.
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SSL Server Test This free online service performs a deep analysis of the configuration of any SSL web server on the public Internet.
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Font Style Matcher If you use font-display: swap this tool is great to make sure the fallback font looks as similar as possible to avoid major layout changes once the web font is loaded and swapped.
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Glyphhanger Your web font utility belt. It can subset web fonts. It can show you what unicode-ranges are used on a web site (optionally per font-family). It can also subset web fonts automatically using the unicode-ranges it found.
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Wakamaifondue Tool to inspect local font files
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3rdParty.io 3rdParty.io monitors third-party scripts and libraries, and checks that they’re following best practices for performance, reliability and security
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3rd Party Audit Google Sheet A Google Sheet provided by Harry Roberts which gives you a nice overview over your used 3rd Party Tools
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Real User Experience Test (rUXt) Access RUM data for 3,237,526 websites accessed by Google Chrome Users
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Waterfall Heatmap Bookmarklet Prints the timing data on assets.
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Test your mobile speed with Google Test score, benchmark with other pages from the same industry, detailed report
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Google Search Console Detect Core Web Vitals issues on your page. Fix it. And revalidate.
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Google Page Speed Insights Show CrUX RUM data of big websites.
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Treo Configure speed metrics using percentiles and intervals for any website from @ChromeUXReport
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Google Speed Scorecard Compare your mobile Site Speed with your competition based on CrUX data
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Google Imapct Calculator Estimate the revenue impact of performance optimisations
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UX Speed Calculator, Sergey Chernyshev A visualization tool that helps understand relationship between page speed, conversion and bounce rates. Does not require a real data (e.g. RUM) and lets you tweak the distributions yourself
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SimilarWeb Find similar pages for a competitor benchmark.
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Build with Understand the technical building blocks of a website.
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Is HTTP2 fast yet?, Andy Davies
These are professional tools which cost money. The cost are usually depends on traffic, server or data.
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New Relic New Relic offers your great tools which give you insight in your whole app stack in real time. New Relic insights lets you also consume 3rd party APIs and correlate performance with business data. It also comes with great monitor solutions which alert you before things getting bad.
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Speedcurve Speedcurve is build on top of WebPageTest and makes running synthetic tests easy. You get nice looking dashboards which are great for running on a big display in your office. With Lux they also integrated a RUM solution.
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Akamai Web Performance Tools With mPulse you can understand how your performance and business data is correlation. With the “What if” tool you can predict the impact of performance changes on your business KPI. Works together with Chrome UX report data and shows RUM data of your competition (if the data is available).
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Calibre Nice Web Perf Tool to measure synthetic data
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Treo Treo is a good choice if you are interested in Lighthouse (Pages) and CrUX (Sites) data.
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Cloudinary Image and video management in the cloud
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Request Metrics Request Metrics is a simple low-cost performance monitoring service. It charts real user metrics and web vitals for your web pages and API endpoints. It also comes with alerting tools that notify you when pages or endpoints slow down.
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Cloudflare Workers They are like service workers in the cloud. With their help you can prototype your web performance optimizations quickly and test the outcome in Webpagetest.org.
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Fast Dom Eliminates layout thrashing by batching DOM measurement and mutation tasks.
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FutureLink Calculates the deceleration of the cursor to predict when a link is about to be clicked.
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guess.js Libraries and tools for enabling data-driven user-experiences on the web.
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WebPageTest Foundation for WebPageTest.org. You can install it locally to run it behind a firewall.
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Lighthouse Codebase of the Google Chrome Lighthouse tool.
Studies are important to understand how the different markets in the world are working. What are the most used devices? What is the average network connection?
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Cumulative Layout Shift Study of Over 1 Million Websites, Mitul Gandhi, 02/2021
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Web Performance Optimisation Stats Web performance studies. Learn how web performance impacts business KPIs. A good source to convince people to invest money in web performance optimisations.
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Progressive Web Apps Stats Learn what influence PWA have on business metrics.
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https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the-internet-report/
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Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant, Tobias Ahlin, 01/2021
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How We Improved SmashingMag Performance, Vitaly Friedman, 01/2021
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Getting Postmark’s Lighthouse Performance Score to 100, Eugene Fedorenko, 09/2020
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Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com, Ashley Watkins, Royi Hagigi, 05/2020
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Bringing service workers to Google Search, Jeff Posnick, 06/2019
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Improving third-party web performance at The Telegraph, Gareth Clubb, 04/2019
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Who has the fastest website in F1?, Jake Archiblad, 03/2019
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How we built the fastest conference website in the world, 03/2019
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Nikkei achieves a new level of quality and performance with their multi-page PWA, Google, 11/2018
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Measuring Web Performance for Wikipedia using synthetic testing tools, Wikimedia Foundation, 10/2018
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A Netflix Web Performance Case Study, Addy Osmani, 11/2018
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How Zalando's overall site speed improved by more than 25% in five months, Zalando, 06/2018
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Fast Fashion: Missguided, Mark Leach & Andy Davies, DeltaV, 06/2018
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Case study: analyzing the Walmart site performance, Ivan Akulov, 04/2018
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A Pinterest Progressive Web App Performance Case Study, Addy Osmani, 11/2017
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Web Almanac 2020 - HTTP Archive's annual state of the web report, 12/2020
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HTTP Archive / Loading speed HTTP archive crawls twice a month the 1.300.000 top sites of the web. This is the best source to understand the state of the web. The HTTP Archive - Guided Tour from Paul Calvano and Rick Viscomi is the best way to get started.
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Firefox Public Data Report, Firefox usage data
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Chrome UX report This is the only source I know of, which provides you with RUM data of the most used websites. The data source is the user data of Chrome users. With Google BigQuery or Page Speed Insights you can analyse your competition.
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Akamai Internet Observatory Browser stats, Network latency between regions
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Open Signal, Mobile status report worldwide
Look for a performance Meetup group close to where you live. This is a great opportunity to share and discuss ideas with other performance experts. Here are some groups close to our offices:
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Barcelona: https://www.meetup.com/Barcelona-Web-Performance/
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Berlin: https://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Web-Performance-Group/
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London: https://ldnwebperf.org/
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Munich: https://www.meetup.com/Munchen-Web-Performance-Group/
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New York City https://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-NY/
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Toronto: https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Web-Performance-Group/
This are all conferences with a strong focus on web performance. They all have a very good lineup:
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Smashing Conference London 2018 (Ticket: Early Bird: $499 — Conference & Workshop: $922) 07–08 February 2018, London, UK
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#perfMatters / Twitter (Ticket: Blind Bird $239 — Conference & Workshop: $748) 27–28 March, 2018, Redwood City, California, USA
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DeltaV / Twitter (Ticket: Early bird £399 + VAT) 10–11 May 2018, London, UK
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Performance.now() / Twitter (Ticket: 550 EUR + VAT) 8–9 November 2018, Amsterdam, Netherland
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We love speed, Bordeaux, France – Not very international, most of the talks are French
The Web Performance Working Group is providing methods to measure and improve aspects of application performance of user agent features and APIs.
The Performance Timing Primer gives a good overview on what the Web Performance Group is working on.