This is the complete guide to the metrics, methods, and measurements of web performance in 2023. If you run a website, this guide has all the fundamental ideas you need to understand to build a fast website for your users, and for search engines.

Whether you’re an e-commerce company, a SaaS provider, or a content publisher, understanding the performance of your website is important to everyone on the team—not just the developers. Performance is a huge part of the user experience and directly tied to how well your website achieves its goals. But web performance is often measured in very technical terms, like Largest Contentful Paint, that cause most business folk’s eyes to glaze over.

Implementing Google Ads can be complicated. If done incorrectly, it negatively impacts your website’s performance. Fortunately, there is a new Google Lighthouse plugin tailored specifically to find problems with your Google ad implementation.

Charting can be complicated and intimidating, especially when dealing with web performance data, flame charts, and percentiles. There is so much data crammed together! Why are the numbers all different?! Let’s break down these charts, what they are good for, and when to use them.

Google has a well earned reputation for speed. At least on their own sites. It’s an entirely different story when it comes to their ad network. Google ads are slowing down thousands of sites across the internet.

Google is using Core Web Vitals as a factor in search results rankings. They’ve also found that improving Core Web Vitals can lead to increased traffic, sales and ultimately conversions. But how can you see your Core Web Vitals easily? Request Metrics is the best solution for monitoring Core Web Vitals across your entire site, but if you just want a quick way to see the Core Web Vitals directly from your browser - check this out.

Webpack is great for building Javascript applications, but did you know it can optimize static HTML assets too? In this article, we use Webpack to process HTML files while automatically optimizing their images too. Hey! Don’t want to read all the in’s and outs of bending Webpack into shape? Jump to the final webpack configuration.

Images are a constant source of pain when developing websites. There are many formats and resolutions a developer must consider in order to maximize web performance. You’ll often end up with a cartesian explosion of the same image in different sizes and formats to support different scenarios. For example, you don’t want to send a high res image meant for high DPI screens to a low DPI screen - you’d be wasting bandwidth and burning time. Using the right file format is equally important.