Wrapping Up

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>> Todd Gardner: That was a lot. That was a lot. We talked about the importance of web performance, why you care? We talked about all these different metrics, all the different ways you can measure it, all the different things that to consider about data points. We talked about testing and tools.

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We talked about setting appropriate goals, and we spent a long time talking about improving your actual web performance metric. Some very like concrete tactics to look at and improve each of your performance metrics and make them better. Along the way we also looked at waterfall charts, flame charts, some statistics, a bunch of stuff.

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So now it's time, just like at the end of every year, to conduct your performance review. We're gonna go through that. All right, a couple of key points that I just want to underline and make sure you walk away with. Why is web performance important? There's three main things that make web performance important to you, to me, to businesses all over the world.

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One, user experience. Making sure the user has the right expectation and that expectation is met about what your website does. Second, SEO, if you're publicly facing, if you care about page rank, you gotta be fast to get onto that first page and make sure your site gets the traffic it needs.

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And third, if you're doing online advertising, you're really just pissing money away if you don't keep your site fast, your bounce rate skyrockets, people don't stay on the page. You're paying money for clicks that don't last. Some notes about user expectations. 40% of users abandon a site if it's not visibly ready in three seconds, and 75% of them just won't come back if they feel the site is slow.

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These are general expectations of users on the web in 2024. And so if we don't hit something like these expectations, you're gonna lose a lot of traffic, you're gonna lose a lot of return customers. SEO, this was a big thing that has happened in the last couple of years.

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The core web vitals specifically are part of the page experience metrics which directly impact your page rank score. If you wanna be on the first page of Google, you gotta be fast. What are those core web vitals? We've talked about them a lot. The largest contentful paint, the cumulative layout shift and interaction to next paint.

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If you care about SEO, you need to know what your scores are for these three things from real users. LCP, how fast your site visibly loads the most important element. It's to be faster than 2.5 seconds. It's cumulative layout shift, how smooth and predictably elements load on your page.

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There needs to be less than point one shifts over the course of the page load. And finally, interaction to next paint, INP, how well users can interact with your site, how fast feels. Is to be less than 200 milliseconds. Now, these are targets that Google has set for these three metrics for SEO.

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But your speed targets might be different if you care about intranet sites or if you care about other metrics. So how deciding how fast is fast enough for you comes down to who your users are and what you're trying to do. When you look at your data, you need to make sure that the data that you're looking at for performance is the right data.

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If you're looking at lab data from lighthouse, page speed insights, webpage tests, those sort of tools, that is lab data and it's diagnostic. You are going in and you need to assume that there's already something that you were looking at and trying to fix. Because just because any one of those tools tell you your site is fast does not mean it's fast.

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If those things tell you it's slow, it probably means it's slow, but not for sure. How do you know that for sure? You look at field data. Field data is the real experience of your users. Field data comes from Crux, the Chrome user experience report, which is publicly available for publicly crawlable internet sites, or it comes from RUM tools, real user data tools, real user monitoring tools that allow you to capture that real user experience from your users.

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When you're looking at data and you're trying to decide what things to measure, you always got follow your business metrics, and this is the golden thing that you're looking for. Which of your performance measurements can you create a correlation with a business metric? If you can create these correlations, this gives you the incentive and the direct reason to spend money fixing these things.

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If you can improve CLS, you get longer session time. If you Improve LCP, you get less bounce rate. Figure out what these things are for you. And you figure that out by looking at who your real users are. Understand what browsers they are? Where they're coming from in the world?

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What screen sizes they're on? What network connections they're on? All of these things to understand your users so you can meet their expectations. And figure out how fast your site needs to be. When it comes down to actually working on your site, always rely on that real user data.

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Don't look at lighthouse, don't look at page speed insights. And then focus on the worst metric you have and do the easiest things first. You're not going to boil the ocean. You can't do everything, and you don't have to. Sometimes your site is fast enough. Work on the things that are going to affect the things that are slowing you down for your site, for your users.

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Okay, what do you do now? You're done with the course. You just spent all fricking day learning about web performance, and you feel you know everything you need to know. What do you go home and do Next? Well, here's the things I think you should do next. One, you should totally test your project.

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So if you wanna use my speed check tool, it's at bit.ly/speed-chex or at this URL, or it's on the request metrics homepage. Test your project, test your publicly available stuff, make sure you know what your real data or your crux data is telling you and whether or not you need to care.

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It's a free, easy way to get started. If you need to dig in and you need RUM tools, which you should totally have RUM tools about the products so that you can get more real-time data and more actionable data about internet sites, private sites sort of thing. Install a rum tool.

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I recommend request metrics. It's awesome. It supports me. It makes the web better, and it's not very expensive. Coming soon, maybe spring 2025, maybe sooner. We're going to do an intermediary web performance. If it's already available, you should go ahead and sign up and do that next. We're going to talk about a bunch more advanced techniques around caching, around IAP issues, around JavaScript issues, around API calling, tons of other cool stuff.

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And last, you should tag me and tell me the stuff you learned and how fast you made your website. All of my information is up on this if you go to bit.ly/sup-todd, you'll get a little contact page for me with my socials, links to my projects, that sort of stuff.

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Some links to schedule time with me. Tag me on LinkedIn. Tell me what you learned. Tell me, like what kinds of stuff you did. That would be awesome. This was fundamentals of web performance. Thank you so much.
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