Web Performance News, February 2020
Hey there,
February was a real storm of exciting things around web performance. So, let’s go straight to it!
Performance Budgets, Pragmatically- @csswizardry wrote a short, but very practical guide about where to start with performance budgeting and how to come up with the initial numbers.
Should you self-host Google Fonts? — That’s a very detailed guide written by @tunetheweb on how Google Web Fonts loading works and all pros and cons around self-hosting those and cutting on their load time. We are currently thinking of doing so on Pixboost website, but in the “test test test” phase right now :)
Web Performance: 11 Must-Read Tips to Give Your Site a Speed Boost — @oliverlindberg wrote a perfect practical intro about what to look at when starting to deal with web performance. And guess what? Optimizing images and lazy load images are on 3rd and 4th places. I would recommend going through the article if you’d like to speed up your website.
Videos from FOSDEM Web Performance Dev Room — FOSDEM 2020 took place on 1st and 2nd of February this year, and there was a separate dev room for web performance! All the videos are available! I would highly recommend watching all of them. My favourites are on OpenSpeedMonitor (it’s fantastic, check it out!) and HTTP resource prioritization.
HTTP/3 for everyone — @bagder published a video, slides and wrote a quick intro from his awesome talk at Fosdem this year. HTTP/3 is coming, and I would recommend everyone in the Web industry to start looking and understanding what it is.
Six web performance resolutions for the new year — if you work in a big organization and wondering how to justify spending money on web performance then this article from @SpeedCurve is for you!
Innovation Can’t Keep the Web Fast — @malchata wrote an excellent post on how technologies are getting better and yet we are still building slower websites and hoping that 5G and HTTP/3 will fix them.
Demystifying Browsers — if you ever wondered how web browsers work, where their source code is who is building them then @ericlaw got you covered! This post has all the links starting with comics about Chrome and ending up with a list of twitter accounts of core developers.
SSL certificates and web performance — @TheRealNooshu and @aaronpeters wrote two blogs about SSL certificates and how they affect web performance. You’ll find what types of certificates are used now and how they are different when browsers are verifying them — “The impact of SSL certificate revocation on web performance” and EV Certificates Make The Web Slow and Unreliable
And here is some browser updates from the trenches:
Safari will support width/height based aspect ratio for images — the change has already landed into WebKit, so should be available soon in Safari. The change will allow avoiding unnecessary layout reflows on the page. Watch this video for more information about the feature — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-d_SoCHeWE
This is it for today, stay tuned and subscribe to our email newsletter here.
