CategoryCore Web Vitals

December 20, 2021 — How to improve Core Web Vitals, a Smashing Magazine case study on how we detected and fixed the bottlenecks, and how we ended up with green scores, all the way. Read more…

June 2, 2021 — Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative has taken the SEO and Web Performance worlds by storm and many sites are busy optimizing their Page Experience to maximize the ranking factor. The Cumulative Layout Shift metric is causing trouble to a lot of sites, so let’s have a look at ways of addressing any issues for that metric. Read more…

May 25, 2021 — Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts. Read more…

May 17, 2021 — Google’s “Page Experience Update” will start rolling out in June. At first, sites that meet Core Web Vitals thresholds will have a minor ranking advantage in mobile search for all browsers. Search is important to any business, and this is the story of how Beau Hartshorne and his team at Instant Domain Search improved their Core Web Vitals scores. Read more…

April 29, 2021 — Images have also been a key part of the web. They communicate ideas instantly, but they are also a lot heavier than text to load. This means that it’s essential to get loading and displaying them right, if you want to give your users a fantastic first impression. An excerpt from Addy’s new book (also, check a free PDF preview). Read more…

April 19, 2021 — How are Core Web Vitals measured? How do you know your fixes have had the desired effect and when will you see the results in Google Search Console? Let’s figure it out. Read more…

March 25, 2021 — How do we get media performance right while staying within performance budgets? Let’s take a look at the recent stats and data around performance budgets, video playback performance issues and some techniques and tools to address these issues. Read more…

March 19, 2021 — Wondering what’s happenin’ at Smashing? Well, we’ve been busy. Here’s a little story of how we removed floating labels, improved performance on mobile, and launched a new series of articles. Oh, and how you can contribute to Smashing, too. Read more…

January 21, 2021 — In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Read more…

January 12, 2021 — Let’s make 2021… fast! An annual front-end performance checklist, with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today, from metrics to tooling and CSS/JavaScript techniques. Read more…