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Images are big. Really big. The bytes required for an image dwarf most site’s CSS and JavaScript assets. Slow images will damage your Core Web Vitals, impacting your SEO and costing you traffic. Images are usually the element driving Largest Contentful Paint and load delays can increase your Cumulative Layout Shift. If you’re not familiar with these metrics, check them out in the Definitive Guide to Measuring Web Performance.

At Request Metrics, we’re always looking for ways to help you make your websites faster and your users happier. Today, we’re excited to announce a major new capability: Unified Performance Monitoring. Request Metrics now combines the power of real-user monitoring with automated lab performance testing to get a complete picture of your website’s performance.

You’ve found some Long Animation Frames (LoAFs) impacting your site, now you need to fix them! LoAFs can make animations feel sluggish, delay user interactions, and generally reduce your site’s responsiveness, all of which contribute to a frustrating experience for users. Fortunately, by analyzing LoAF data and addressing common performance bottlenecks, you can dramatically improve how smoothly your site runs.

Your website’s performance can make or break your business. Slow load times, crashes under pressure, and a poor user experience can cost you customers, reduce your search engine rankings, and hurt your bottom line. That’s why monitoring and testing your site’s performance is critical—but not all performance monitoring is the same. At Request Metrics, we focus on Real User Monitoring (RUM), which shows you how real users are experiencing your website in real-time.

A Long Animation Frame, often called a LoAF, occurs when your website’s animations take too long to render, slowing down interactions and making your site feel “frozen” or “janky.” And yes, it’s hilarious that it sounds like a loaf of bread—so get ready for plenty of bread, butter, and toasting puns! You might be thinking, “I’m building an online store (or whatever), what do I care about animations? I’m not talking about cartoons.

Everyone in web performance talks about CrUX—what the heck is it?! CrUX, or the Chrome User Experience Report, is Google’s initiative to measure how websites perform for their real users. It’s not just another test, it’s a window into the actual experience people have when they visit a site. Wait—didn’t Googlebot and PageSpeed Insights already do this? Are they going away? Not exactly.

What is the slowest part of your website? Most of the time, it’s the resources: all the CSS, fonts, images, and JavaScript that powers your webpage. Resources that are too big or too slow are often the root cause of slow Core Web Vitals. This week, we’re releasing a bunch of new tools and reports to better understand your web resources, how they impact your website performance, and where you have opportunities to improve.

Browsers provide detailed performance information about every resource a webpage loads. Most of this information is hidden during cross-origin requests however. This is a common problem since pages often load content from a variety of origins. Pages can access cross-origin timing information if an additional header is added to cross-origin responses.

Starting software products is hard, and it’s easy to make mistakes. We’ve started a lot of products – and we’ve made a whole lot of mistakes along the way. But that’s not going to stop us. We’re stubborn like that. Today we are launching Request Metrics for the third time, and I’m reflecting on what we did wrong in the first two attempts, and how we’re going to be better, faster, and strong next time.

Kent C Dodds made a claim on Twitter (X) that the “biggest performance problems are probably backend, not frontend related.” Is this true? Some websites have slow backends, for sure. Others have slow frontends. A few unfortunate sites are slow in both. But as of today, right now in 2023, which is the bigger performance problem for most teams, the frontend or the backend? I wanted to explore it with some real data from the web.