Improving Performance

[00:00:00]
>> Todd Gardner: We're gonna talk about a lot of stuff in here. We're gonna talk about improving web performance. We're gonna go through each of the metrics that we talked about. And we're gonna assume that you've done some work to figure out what are your performance goals? What are appropriate goals for your site, for your users, for your industry, for your competitors?

[00:00:19]
And what are some tactics that you can use to improve your key metrics to be where you need them to be? That's what we're gonna talk about next. This is the part that we're gonna start getting actionable. So improving web performance.
>> Todd Gardner: A couple of notes on how you think about this, how you do this.

[00:00:39]
Focus on the easiest fixes for your worst metrics first, from your real user data.
>> Todd Gardner: This is just like project planning, like work planning here. So if you're not basing this off of real user data, you don't really know what you're working on. If you're basing this off of a lighthouse score, you don't know that that's real you.

[00:01:00]
You don't know what that lighthouse score was represents reality or the real users. So base it off of real data from Crux or from your ram tool. And then look at whichever metric that's interesting to you is the worst one. Because if you're just starting, there might be more than one that's bad, focus on the worst one.

[00:01:20]
And then do the easiest thing for your structure first, because you don't need to do everything. I know a lot of people, I'm a perfectionist, I would want to do everything, I wanna take every single box about web performance to make sure my site is the fastest thing it could ever be.

[00:01:36]
But you don't need to do that, sometimes it's fast enough. And I'll that's probably heresy for a web performance person to say, but you don't need to do everything. If all your stuff is green and you've never put your stuff behind a CDN, maybe you don't need a CDN, maybe, you just don't.

[00:01:56]
We'll base what you do off of your data, your metrics. The secret thing that I like to think about when I'm trying to figure out what do I need to do? Generally, when we're talking about computers, things are operating at the speed of light and you can't make the speed of light go faster.

[00:02:14]
So all you can really do is find a way to do fewer things, between when the user starts and when that metric happens, find a way to do fewer things. And sometimes that means putting fewer things on the page, sometimes it means making those things less bytes. Sometimes that means caching things in various places along the way.

[00:02:33]
But generally, the only way to make things faster is to do fewer things in between the two things you're trying to measure.
>> Todd Gardner: We got a lot here, we're gonna go through each one of these and we're gonna talk about specific tactics. And some of them have a lot of things you can do, and some of them, there's really only one thing you can do.

[00:02:51]
But we're gonna break this down individually so that this is a really great index for you to come back to later. And find hey, it's this section on this course, it talks all about this. We're trying to fix FCP, come back and watch this section of this course.