What Trys describes here mirrors my experience too—it really is worth occasionally taking a little time to catch the low-hanging fruit of your site’s web performance (and accessibility):
I’ve shaved nearly half a megabyte off the page size and improved the accessibility along the way. Not bad for an evening of tinkering.
- Make the right thing easy
- Always answer “so what”?
- Close the gap between “something is wrong” to “we fixed it”
Spoiler: the answer to the question in the title is a resounding “hell yeah!”
Scott brings receipts.
WebPageTest just got even better! Now you can mimic the results of what would’ve previously required actually shipping, like adding third-party scripts, switching from a client-rendered to a server-rendered architecture and other changes that could potentially have a big effect on performance. Now you can run an experiment to get the results before actual implementation.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the new redesign of WebPageTest is lovely!
I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.
I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.
He makes an interesting observation at the end:
However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.
Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, the vast majority of sites out there on the web are not being built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.
The context here is JavaScript, not apples or olives.
This is yet another great explainer from Ire. Tree shaking is one of those things that I thought I understood, but always had the nagging doubt that I was missing something. This article really helped clear things up for me.
Dave on the opaqueness of toolchains:
As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue.
There’s a connection here to one of the biggest issues with what’s currently being labelled “AI”:
In the same way AI needs some design to show its work in how it came to its final answer, I feel that our automated build tools could use some help as well.
I really like this suggestion for making the invisble visible:
I sometimes wonder if Webpack or Gulp or [Insert Your Build Tool Here] could benefit from a Scratch-like interface for buildchains.
Push notifications explained using astrology. But don’t worry, there’s also some code, just in case you prefer your explanations to also include models that actually work.
I still find the landscape of build tools completely overwhelming, but I found this distinction to be a useful way of categorising the different kinds of build tools:
Build tools do two things:
- Install things
- Do things
So bower, npm and yarn install things, whereas grunt, gulp, and webpack do things.
I think.
Following on from Amber’s introduction, here’s a really in-depth look at image formats, compression and optimisation techniques from Addy.
This is a really nicely put together little web book released under a Creative Commons licence.
This is a great free service for doing a bit of performance monitoring on your site. It uses WebPageTest and you do all the set up via a Github repo that then displays the results using Github Pages.
It won’t give you the power or control of Calibre but it’s a handy option for smaller sites. Here are the results for adactio.com running on a Moto G over 3G.
Obrigado, Eduardo!
A Mac app for converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP.
Steve describes a script you can use on WebPageTest to simulate going offline so you can test how your progressive web app performs.
This strikes me as an eminently sensible idea by Emil: using the picture element to begin providing WebP alternatives to JPG.
Of course, picture-supporting browsers will have to adjust their decision-making algorithm to support this pattern.
Oh, Jeremy, you silly billy. It turns out that this works right out of the box. Nice!