From ‘Fully Loaded’ to Core Web Vitals: Understanding the Evolution of Performance Metrics
From ‘Fully Loaded’ to Core Web Vitals: Understanding the Evolution of Performance Metrics
We had conducted an interesting webinar with Performance Engineering Experts, Patrick Meenan and Tim Kadlec, discussing on an interesting topic – From ‘Fully Loaded’ to Core Web Vitals: Understanding the Evolution of Performance Metrics, in conversation with Dr. Niladri Choudhuri, on May 6.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a flurry of new performance metrics as the industry has put a priority on accurately measuring the entire performance journey. We’ve matured past looking merely at a theoretically “fully loaded” state to finding ways to holistically measure the experience instead with focuses on key, user-focused milestones.
But with the new flurry of metrics has come challenges around stability and consistency, making it hard for organizations to create reliable goalposts to aim for.
In this talk, Patrick and Tim will explore how we got to this point, the metrics we’ve loved along the way, and how the new core web vital metrics are seeking to provide some stability to the picture. They’ll get into the weeds about how each metric is reported, what they’re good at, and a few shortcomings and gotcha’s to be aware of.
Key Takeaways
- Importance of Core Web Vitals
- How WebPageTest provides deep performance measurements?
- How WebPageTest offers actionable insights to help developers stay ahead of the curve?
- Focus on web performance metrics, its value in IT industry
- How developers can measure web performance both ad hoc as well as programmatically?
Highlights
- Know about the history of web performance
- How important is the metrics measurement today?
- How can it be handled from the front end, from the browser perspective, page load time?
- How the speed index still a valuable metric in the web performance world?
- At what point can the user interact with the application that they’re looking at?
- What are those metrics that goes into the core web vitals?
- What are those key milestones from a user perspective?
- How well the metrics are representative of the user experience?
- What are the focus points for search signals for page experience?
- Effective usage of WebPage Testing in performance metrics
This topic impacts every single website that cares about SEO in the world and is super relevant with the developer community. The CWV metrics will start getting monitored on a regular basis by developers and ancillary teams, given Google’s May launch including these performance metrics within their search engine ranking algorithm.
Patrick Meenan, Engineering Fellow, Catchpoint
Patrick has been working on web performance in one form or another for the last 20 years and is currently working on web performance measurement at Catchpoint. Prior to that he worked at Facebook, Cloudflare and Google to make Chrome and the web faster. Patrick created the popular open source WebPageTest web performance measurement tool.
Tim Kadlec, Performance Engineering Fellow, Catchpoint
Tim is a Performance Engineering Fellow at Catchpoint, web performance consultant, and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use. He is the author of High-Performance Images (O’Reilly, 2016) and Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (New Riders, 2012). He writes about all things web at timkadlec.com.