Daily Brush for Website Speed: Embrace the Performance Budget Ritual

In this talk I will use the dental metaphor in order to introduce the performance budgets just like brushing teeth everyday to keep them clean and healthy you should do the same for your website by setting a performance budget and check it in every pull request in your pipelines, the target audience is mid-level to advanced, I will start by the example of the tooth decay and cleaning them then brushing them everyday as the dentist advice, then explain decay as the performance issue and performance budgeting is like the toothpaste and go from here with the different techniques that developers can do in order to prevent any loss in the performance wins they made.

This talk has been presented at React Day Berlin 2023, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

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FAQ

Just like dental hygiene requires regular maintenance to prevent problems, web performance needs continual attention to avoid regressions. Neglecting either can lead to issues that might not become apparent until they become severe, impacting overall health or user experience.

The two types of performance testing mentioned are synthetic testing (or lab testing) and Real User Monitoring (RUM, also known as field testing). Synthetic testing is consistent but not very accurate, while RUM provides real user data, making it highly accurate but not always free.

Tools for applying and monitoring a performance budget include Bundlesize, Webpack, Lighthouse CI for free options, and paid tools like SpeedCurve and Caliper. These tools integrate into development processes to help ensure performance targets are met without exceeding the set budgets.

Creating a performance budget involves measuring current site performance, setting specific performance goals based on metrics that are important to you, and then planning and fixing issues to meet these goals. Once satisfied with the performance, that benchmark can be set as your performance budget.

Making a performance budget stick involves integrating the budget into your development and deployment workflows so that it is enforced automatically. This includes setting concrete, actionable, and meaningful performance targets that align with business goals and making the budget visible and enforceable within the team.

If new features are degrading web performance, consider optimizing existing features, removing outdated or non-critical features, or rethinking the implementation of new features to ensure they don't impact critical performance metrics. Regularly testing and adjusting based on performance data is essential.

Real User Monitoring is crucial because it provides genuine insights into how real users experience your website, including data on geolocation, browser type, and internet connection. This accuracy helps in making informed decisions to optimize performance effectively.

A web performance budget is a set of guidelines that restrict the size of a web page or its resources to ensure it performs well. It helps in preventing performance regressions affecting user experience and business goals by setting limits on metrics like load times, resource sizes, and the number of HTTP requests.

Medhat Dawoud
Medhat Dawoud
13 min
12 Dec, 2023

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Video Summary and Transcription
This Talk provides an introduction to web performance and emphasizes the importance of setting performance goals and budgets. It explains the steps for creating and applying a performance budget and suggests various tools for performance budgeting. The Talk also highlights the need to make the performance budget concrete and meaningful, connect it to business goals, and integrate it into the development pipeline. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of maintaining performance and connecting with the speaker for more information.

1. Introduction to Web Performance

Short description:

Hi, everyone. My name is Ned Haddawood, a senior software engineer working for Miro and a Google expert in web performance. Today, I'm going to take you on a journey to impress web performance budget rituals. Imagine the website as a human body, with performance being the teeth. The more you feed your website with new features, the more you need to care about performance. Just like bad teeth, performance problems may not be immediately noticeable, but they can greatly impact your experience. So let's get started.

Hi, everyone. My name is Ned Haddawood. I'm a senior software engineer working for Miro and a Google expert in web performance. Today, I'm going to get you on a journey to impress web performance budget rituals. But before that, let's imagine together if the website is like the human body. Human body is growing up by eating food. The more you're eating food, the more you need to brush your teeth, the more you need to floss your teeth on a daily basis, right?

If you imagine the website is like a human body, I imagine performance as your teeth. So the more you are feeding your website with new features, the more you need to care about performance. The similarity between both of them, if you have a problem in teeth, you're visiting a dentist to fix it for you. If you have a problem in performance, you might visit or hire a performance expert to fix it for you. Both of them cannot be fixed because with a smaller check-in inspection, you will find out that you were not caring too much about them.

Some people might argue and say, Well, we are not doing that and turns out just fine. Just like these two gentlemen. But here are two facts. First of all, bad teeth are working too. You can eat on bad teeth, but believe me, you're not going to enjoy food. The other fact is that you don't know for how long you're not going to suffer from a problem from your teeth or your performance. It might take a long time until you find out a lot of problems jumping in. So the sooner you are acting, the better. So let's jump on.

2. Measuring Performance and Setting Goals

Short description:

If you have a problem, the first thing to do is to measure it to understand its magnitude. There are two types of performance measurement: synthetic testing and real user measuring. Synthetic testing is consistent and free, but not super accurate. Real user measuring provides accurate data but may not always be free. By using both methods, we can measure various metrics and set performance goals based on research thresholds and recommendations. It's important to differentiate between performance goals and performance budgets. If you encounter performance issues, it's crucial to address them and demonstrate their impact on the online business. Suggesting a performance sprint and focusing on enhancing performance can yield positive results.

If you have a problem. The first thing to do is to measure this problem to just see how big or small this problem so you can act on.

So measuring performance, we have two types of measuring performance. The first one is synthetic testing, also known as lab testing using something like Lighthouse. It has some benefits and has some bad things. The good thing is that it's very consistent and it's free and it's handy. Just easy to do, but it's not super accurate. This is a problem. Why is this not super accurate? Because it depends pretty much on the machine that we are running on.

The other type is RAM testing, real user measuring, or also known as fill testing. This is more interesting for us today. And this is coming with real user, plug in, opt in, and we're getting bunch of information about them that will help us take more and better decisions. It's like geolocation, browser and time, Internet connection, and so on. It's very accurate and we can rely on it, but it's not always free. One free option could be the Chrome User Experience Report. But other paid options, like Calibre, Speedcurve, and so on, are totally worth it as well. As you can see in a bit.

So, using both of them you can measure a lot of metrics that are very useful for us to measure performance and to decide whether our website is performant enough or not. They came as well with some research thresholds and recommendations. For example, in front of us, three recommendations based on the core web vitals. For the LCP for example, we need to make it under 4 seconds at least to make it work fine. And 2.5 seconds is a recommendation for a good experience for the user. This is very useful to set your performance goal. And there is difference between performance goal and performance budget as we will see in a bit.

So, you have a problem, you went to the manager and say, Hey, we have a serious problem in our performance. We have performance issues. Just said, alright, we can postpone it after the next quarter future, right? He showed the number. This is not affecting the business, right? But it is, of course, affecting your business, online business. And you suggest to make a performance sprint for the whole team focusing on performance to enhance it. You did a good job, you and your team, and you turned everything to be green.

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