Performance

To avoid page loading jank, there are things we can do to avoid content from shifting around, even if repainting is still necessary.

My go-to local app image optimizer has long been ImageOptim. It’s Mac-only (and free), but they suggest alternatives for other platforms. I reach for ImageOptim usually when I want to optimize a whole bunch of images in a batch. For one-offs, you can’t do much better than Squoosh, a great progressive web app (PWA). I […]

Putting a YouTube video inside a closed details element means it won’t load until that details element is opened. We can use that.

Matt Smith: React Hooks have been around for years, but most codebases still use them the same way: a bit of useState, an overworked useEffect, and a lot of patterns that get copy-pasted without much thought. […]

Paul Smith made these Classic Mac OS System 1 Patterns, which are super tiny (in size) graphics that work with background-repeat to make old school “textures”. They have an awfully nostalgic look for me, but they are so simple I can see them being useful in modern designs as well.

Safari made .mp4 file work in img tags in HTML back in 2017, but no other browser followed suite. Should they have?

There is some low-hanging web performance fruit with images. Serving them in the right format, from a CDN, with the right HTML can be a big perf win.

Calibre, the website performance testing app, launched a one-off Website Speed Test page anyone can use for free. This is nice it requires no special knowledge to use (anyone can type in a URL), the test can be run from significant geolocations (that probably aren’t where you live), and the test result is saved and […]

Learn how Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures web interactivity, why it matters for user experience and SEO, and practical strategies to keep your site feeling fast and responsive.

Almost every site has at least one third-party script on it, and the average is 5. I’ve taken that from the blog post Introducing Nuxt Scripts from Harlan Wilton. While third-party scripts are a performance and security drain, they are, as Harlan puts it “fundamentally useful and aren’t going anywhere soon.” Typically, you just chuck […]