Network request waterfalls show what resources are loaded when opening a website. This helps developers and website owners understand why different content elements show up at different times and how it can be optimized.
Recently I made a wall calendar with 12 request waterfalls for a conference, highlighting different web performance issues. This article goes through these waterfalls one by one and explains what they show. You can also test your own website to see what you can optimize.
When opening a website your browser downloads a bunch of text files, for example the HTMl document, CSS stylesheets, or JavaScript application code. The larger these files are the longer it will take load them and visitors will have to wait longer for your page content to appear.
This article takes a look at HTTP text compression, a simple but effective way to reduce your page weight and improve page load time. We'll also compare the two most common text compression algorithms, GZIP and Brotli.
The async and defer attributes exist to help you make your website load faster. This article explains what these attributes do and when you should use them.
Browsers load a website by requesting resources from a server. Each request has a different priority that determines when network resources are used to load the file and how quickly the resource is loaded.
This article looks at why resource priorities matter and how optimizing them can make your website faster.
The web works by clients requesting resources from servers using the HTTP protocol. Server connections are needed so that data is transferred reliably and securely.
This article will look at how browsers create connections to servers on the web, the network round trips that are needed to create a connection, and how all of this impacts page speed.
What happens when you open a web page in your browser? How is content loaded from the internet and displayed to the user?
This article takes a look at how resources are loaded using the HTTP protocol and how they come together to form a web page. We’ll also take a look at what this means for how long it takes to load a website.
Render-blocking resources: they're the critical files that delay your page content appearing, and can increase Core Web Vitals metrics like the Largest Contentful Paint.
Some of these files might be important, but they can add crucial seconds to your load times, damage your Core Web Vitals scores, and even incur penalties in your search rankings. In this article, we'll explain which files block rendering and why – and how to eliminate their performance impact.