Grocery shopping is tedious and time consuming. In search of a more streamlined experience, I decided to try Instacart. Unfortunately, using their site is also tedious and time consuming.

I hate slow websites. They are annoying to use and frustrating to work on. But what does it mean to be “slow”? It used to be waiting for document load. Then waiting for page ready. But with so many asynchronous patterns in use today, how do we even define what “slow” is? The W3C has been working on this with the new Event Timing and Element Timing API, and has defined some new Web Vital metrics to describe the different ways that slow performance can impact a webpage.

First Input Delay (FID) measures how long the browser took to respond to the first user input event. It’s one of several Core Web Vital metrics that measure how real users perceive the performance of modern web applications. New measurements like First Input Delay are increasingly important as JavaScript and SPA’s do more work on the client side.

Google has long used website performance as a ranking criteria for search results. Despite the importance of page experience for SEO, many sites still suffer unacceptable load times. Poor performance is often a confluence of factors: slow time to first byte, hundreds of resource requests, and way too much JavaScript.

Web analytics is often based on invasively collecting and aggregating user data. But web analytics doesn’t have to be an invasion of privacy. A growing movement of businesses, including performance monitoring services like Request Metrics, are working to create sustainable web analytics tools. Tools that give web developers the metrics they need to improve their websites without compromising the privacy of our users.

News teams often compete to break the story first. We think they should also compete on being the first to load their website. Let’s apply our web performance skills to a real world example: which news website has the best performance? Let’s solve this question by loading the homepages of some large news sites. A sampling of Alexa’s Top Sites gives four test candidates: Google News, CNN, The New York Times (NYT), and Fox News. Take a look, which feels fastest to you?