Despite the increase in internet speeds, the user experience on many websites has not proportionally improved due to bloated websites and performance issues. Websites designed to load static content all at once remain the most accessible universally and often outperform all other websites. Modern websites that prioritize complex features over basic usability like scrolling and search are often slower than average.
Wednesday, April 17, 2024A poor Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score can often be caused by backend issues. While tools like Page Speed Insights and Google Lighthouse are helpful for frontend analysis, tracing user journeys and examining spans help uncover more issues. By doing so, developers can pinpoint problematic database queries or other backend operations that contribute to slow LCP scores.
The New York Times upgraded its React version, which brought some unexpected challenges. The upgrade required solving challenges with existing embedded interactives and managing script loading order. However, the result of the upgrade was immediately better performance. For example, its INP scores in the p75 range dropped by roughly 30% across the entire site.
Parallel DOM makes your web apps faster by parallelizing away heavy DOM operations.
Notion recently improved its browser performance by using SQLite for client-side caching. This led to a 20% increase in page navigation speeds through a SharedWorker architecture to manage concurrency and prevent database corruption. SQLite was implemented using WebAssembly for local data storage and offline functionality. In this post, the team at Notion goes through challenges they faced with slow disk reads and initial page load times.
The new Performance Panel features in Chrome DevTools provide detailed insights and tools for optimizing Core Web Vitals and overall web performance. This tutorial explains how to access and configure these features. It also goes over how to interpret lab and field data, along with practical tips for fixing LCP, CLS, and INP issues using the new Performance Panel features.