The blog of SpeedCurve, a web performance monitoring company, covering page weight, JavaScript growth, performance metrics, and how speed affects users.
HN commenters cite it for data on web page bloat and growing JavaScript, and its founder uses it to discuss web performance monitoring.
One technique I've seen work well for getting bosses to care is showing them how much slower their sites are than their competitors - nobody wants to be worse than their competition.
In SpeedCurve, for just around $8/mo per page/site you can set up daily synthetic checks for the business and its competitors, covering multiple profiles: mobile/3g, tablet/4g, desktop/fibre.
You can use both the metrics (Start Render, SpeedIndex, Hero Paint) [1] and the filmstrip videos to literally show them how they compare side-by-side [2] – this is super-powerful as it's so visual.
Disclaimer: I don't work for SpeedCurve, just a fan of the tool.
[1]: https://speedcurve.com/features/synthetic/#benchmark
[2]: https://speedcurve.com/demo/video/?tests=180102_1T_d12fa882f96f9d47f41c2a8bf28cf4da-r:1-l:Guardian%20Beta,180102_EA_0b97a9024342f3c8d4284d9c260d1518-r:3-l:Huffington,180102_98_d180807b4c0bcaf41a9f041560d21177-r:3-l:NY%20Times,180102_HD_e9ba114b9465ef873c00aa8462e50191-r:2-l:Smashing,180102_NE_c348ece5abf63c8482bc064ca1cbeb4d-r:1-l:TechCrunch,180102_H6_f4eaed5fd9a194e3c529a449a03721ec-r:3-l:The%20Verge&share=39tfnozeq94p1o0hndk1kpbg4vb7cg
SpeedCurve is proving to be very profitable for a side project. Paid back initial $3k investment in server costs and now growing at 32% month on month. Can't live on it yet, but it will cover a couple of conferences and a two week holiday in New York this year. Also just won $10k in a startup competition, does that count as profit? ;)
http://speedcurve.com/
For bootstrapped SaaS projects it's worth remembering how long it can take to grow the flywheel and see growth. It took Rob from HitTail a year after launch to connect with the right audience and Freckle took 5 years to get to $57k/month. It's a multiyear investment to grow something substantial.
http://unicornfree.com/2013/5-years-of-saas-growth-every-month-exact-numbers
SpeedCurve has been in development for a year and available commercially for only 5 months. Haven't even started doing any marketing yet with all current growth via word of mouth.
Pages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels slower despite my phone and connection being much faster. It seems web developers have stopped caring at all about performance.
If you look at where the bloat went, it's mostly three things:
- Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra requests)
Most likely culprits are retina class graphics and "hero graphic" designs.
- Javascript sizes and number of requests doubled
Corresponds to a shift from jquery + some manually added plugins to npm / webpack pipelines and using a massive amount of (indirect) dependencies.
- video
Now that flash has disappeared, it got replaced by auto-playing video, which is even worse as far as page bloat is concerned.
[1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
I've been working in the web performance monitoring space (https://speedcurve.com/) for 3 years now, and the 3 years prior to that I was doing a lot of performance work at the BBC. I can't share the data for obvious reasons but I can confidently say that the web is getting measurably slower every year, despite connection speeds increasing drastically over the last few years.
We like to over-simplify and try to attribute it to things like JS frameworks, advertising, media-heavy pages, etc. The truth is that it is all of these things, and so much more. Yes, devices are more powerful, but we are also asking our devices to do more. Yes, connections are faster, but bandwidth doesn't help with things like TCP slow start or browser concurrency limits. On top of all of this, our perception of speed is changing, so things can _feel_ slower than they really are.
“This insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts.”
Since rss is text only the sizes are very small and compress well. Considering the average web page is 3M[0], pulling down 10-100k of every post ever doesn’t matter. And http takes care of not pulling the same file over and over.
It’s certainly a downside, but completely useable as is, and better than any viable alternative.
As far as standards go, I prefer simple, static file, over something requiring dynamic response.
There’s also nothing stopping the site from limiting the RSS feed to only 5 posts with a link for full.
[0] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
Unfortunately too much JS has made the web slower, check this https://www.speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/ for a quick view or infrequently.org for longer explanations. React starts to be dated now and there are leaner alternatives offering most of the functional advantages, like Svelte or Lit.
The tooling evolves indeed and I hope it gets again nearer to the browsers, thanks to web components, better CSS (hello variables), WASM and much more.