Advent

Typography plays a central role in the design, branding, and overall readability of content. On the web, typography is achieved chiefly via webfonts. While the default system/”web-safe” fonts (hello Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) are a reasonable and incredibly performant strategy for presenting content online, webfonts allow you to customize your typography to create a memorable, and delightful experience for your users. Even so, custom webfonts (as most nice things do) come at a performance cost. The text (and many other styles defined in your style sheet) is blocked from rendering until your requested webfont loads. This means a terrible overall experience for users who may experience jank via layout repaints or worse, be presented with no text at all. Considering that webfonts are responsible for the design and general readability of your web content, optimizing your web fonts should be of high priority in your overall performance strategy. ...

Video is one of the most sought out mediums on the web and is used widely in web page designs today. According to a Cisco report, video constitutes the majority of the world’s internet traffic. In 2017, video was reported to have constituted 75% of all internet traffic and this number is slated to surpass 80% by 2022. This should come as no surprise to most of use, considering the fact that video content is a powerful medium for visual communication and offers a great way to keep users engaged. Adding video to websites however, can oftentimes be a double-edged sword; We may make some gains via a richer, more delightful user experience but risk performance issues if our websites are not optimized appropriately. This, alongside the rapid growth of traffic originating from mobile and wireless connections means we as developers are increasingly responsible for optimizing our sites for performance. In this post, we’ll dive into video optimization strategies so we can reap the benefits video provides without driving users away. ...

Images make up a large portion of a webpage’s payload. According to the HTTP Archive, the average image size has grown almost twofold and now constitute a whopping 63% of total bytes of a webpage. This growth in images on the web has coincided with faster network speeds and growing bandwidth; meaning that loading webpages today has never been faster— for some of us. High network latencies and low bandwidth (mostly over mobile connections) is unfortunately commonplace for a large percentage of the world. This means incredibly slow webpage load times and an increasingly frustrating experience browsing webpages. While doing away with images altogether would theoretically solve the problem of slow page load—removing all images from the top 1,000 websites, these sites would load 30% faster on average over 3G (high performance images)—a text only webpage would significantly hamper user engagement. Thankfully, there are many tricks to optimizing images for the web so we don’t have to skimp on the overall design and user experience of a webpage. ...

Early on in my career, when web performance metrics were brought up in conversation, I would take how others reacted to the number as a cue to understanding what those numbers meant (read: I had no idea what those numbers meant). A high number elicited shock and horror, while a low number drew admiration and praise. This could only mean, high page weight bad, low page weight good. Though my naïveté around web performance at the time was a result of my overall lack of experience, it did highlight a point worth considering; the concept of a “page weight” is somewhat of a confusing term especially when seen in isolation. ...