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Google Fonts is a fantastic tool for web designers and developers, but it is sometimes one of the slowest resources on your website. It’s frustrating and ironic that Google’s own font service is the long pole in so many web performance reports, but it doesn’t have to be! Here’s 5 ways to supercharge your install of Google Fonts to make it download less, load faster, and reduce layout shifts of your website.

Brotli is gaining steam as the compression algorithm du jour for high performance websites. Created back in 2013 by Google to decrease the size of WOFF files, Brotli was standardized in 2016 as part of RFC 7932. The sales pitch for Brotli is better compression than Gzip - with similar CPU usage. Better compression leads to faster performance, but how much better is it?

Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring are the most important tools in your performance toolbox. But they do different things and are useful at different times and many developers only spend time mastering one of these tools and only see a part of their performance problems, like trying to hammer in a screw. Let’s look at these tools, what they measure, and when to use them.

Advertising is everywhere on the web and users have noticed. More than 40% of internet users block ads. Are these users sticking it to the man or just tired of slow site performance? To find out, we measure advertising’s performance impact on a few popular sites.

Are slow FCP scores getting you down? Worried that website performance is frustrating your users and hurting your SEO rankings? This FCP cheat sheet has all the tactics (with links) you’ll need to have screaming-fast FCP scores. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a measurement of how long it takes to show the user the first bit of content. Measuring FCP encourages your website to respond quickly to requests so that users know their request has been received.

First Contentful Paint, or FCP, measures the time take to render the first element of a webpage. It’s a modern, user-centric measurement of how fast users see a response from your website. Here’s everything you need to know about the metric and how to use it. FCP is one of the Core Web Vital performance metrics that measure user’s perceived performance of websites. These metrics are incredibly important to delivering fast user experiences, and avoiding SEO performance penalties.

Earlier this month, David’s heartfelt posting about leaving Mozilla made the front page of Hacker News. Traffic increased by 800% to his already-busy website, which slowed and eventually failed under the pressure. Request Metrics monitors performance and uptime for David’s blog, and our metrics tell an interesting story. Here’s what happened, why, and what you can do to prepare your site for traffic surges.

Web performance used to be easy. You’d time how long a page takes to load, easy. But the rise of client-side JavaScript has introduced bold new ways for websites to be frustratingly slow. Measuring this new slowness will take new metrics. Google calls them the Core Web Vitals. Each of the Core Web Vitals measures a different aspect of how a web application responds. This post will take a look at each of these metrics, what they measure, and how to use them.

Google Lighthouse helps you identify page performance issues. It generates an overall performance “score” to make you feel good (or bad) about your site’s speed. This score can be useful, but has some limitations. Lighthouse is an automated tool for assessing web page quality. It generates metrics for performance, SEO, accessability and more. Google has been promoting it as THE way to measure website quality.

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.