All Things Smashing: Monthly Update

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Juggling between three languages on a daily basis, Iris is known for her love of linguistics, arts, web design and typography, as well as her goldmine of … More about Iris ↬

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With so much going on, we’ve made it our mission to help you stay on top of things. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and subscribe to our RSS feed, but it’s nice to have an overview of the most important things in one place.

We can’t repeat enough how wonderful the web performance community is! There are good folks who help make the web faster, and their efforts matter indeed. With the new year sinking in and everyone’s resolutions still being put to the test, personal goals such as reproducing bugs and fixing issues suddenly become something we all have in common: improving the web for everyone involved.

As various areas of performance become more and more sophisticated and complicated throughout the years, Vitaly refines and updates his front-end performance checklist every year. This guide covers pretty much everything from performance budgets to single-page apps to networking optimizations. It has proved to be quite useful to folks in the past years — anyone can edit it (PDF, MS Word Doc and Apple Pages) and adjust it to their own personal needs or even use it for their organization.

Now, without further ado, let’s see what’s been cooking at Smashing!

Exciting Times: New Smashing Book

The cover of the upcoming Smashing Book named “Ethical Design Handbook”Are you ready for the next Smashing book? Well, just like all the printed books we’ve published, each and every is crafted to deliver in-depth knowledge and expertise shared by experts and practitioners from the industry. The Ethical Design Handbook will not be any different. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen, the book will be pre-released late January.

As always, there will be a pre-order discount available. We expect to ship printed hardcover copies late February, but in the meantime, feel free to subscribe to the book mailing list so that you can be one of the first folks to get your hands on the book!

Less Speaking, More Time For Questions

Our SmashingConfs are known to be friendly, inclusive events where front-end developers and designers come together to attend live sessions and hands-on workshops. From live designing to live debugging, we want you to ask speakers anything — from naming conventions to debugging strategies. For each talk, we’ll have enough time to go into detail, and show real examples from real work on the big screen.

A photo of Dan Mall standing on stage explaining code shown on the screen behind him
Dan Mall, Brad Frost and Ian Frost coding live on stage at SmashingConf in NYC. (Image credit: Drew McLellan) (Watch video)

If you’re eager not to miss out on one of our SmashingConfs, then early-bird tickets are still available. And if you need a lil’ help convincing your boss to send you to an event, let us know! We’ve got your back. 😉

A Taste Of Smashing… Offscreen

We’ve reached our 7th episode of the Smashing Podcast! We’re so proud and thrilled to have our dear friends and colleagues, Drew McLellan and Bethany Andrew, managing the bi-weekly interview show so brilliantly! The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and now we’re excited for many more!

Shining The Spotlight On TypeScript

In less than two weeks (Jan. 29), we’ll be hosting a Smashing TV webinar with Stefan Baumgartner who’ll shed light on what type-checking has in store for folks creating and using the web. TypeScript has been one of the most hyped technologies in 2019 — it’s now time to look beyond the hype!

Mark your calendars and join us at 17:00 London time — we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences you’ve had in your career.

We publish a new article every day on various topics that are current in the web industry. Here are some that our readers seemed to enjoy the most and have recommended further:

Best Picks From Our Newsletter

With the start of a brand-new decade, we decided to start off with topics dedicated to web performance. There are so many talented folks out there working on brilliant projects, and we’d love to spread the word and give them the credit they deserve!

Note: A huge thank you to Cosima Mielke for writing and preparing these posts!

Which Metrics Matter Most?

First Meaningful Paint, Time to Interactive, First Input Delay, SpeedIndex. With so many performance metrics floating around, it’s not easy to strike just the right balance for a project. And most of the time, these metrics alone will be too generic and not precise enough, so we’ll need to complement them with custom ones as well. In small and large companies it’s common to define important pixels in the UI, measure how fast we can start render them, and how quickly we can provide input responsiveness for them.

Every project could benefit from a mix of at least 4 metrics. Time To Interactive (TTI) is the key metrics for understanding how much wait a user has to experience to use the site without a lag. First Input Delay (FID) complements TTI very well as it describes the missing part of the picture: what happens when a user actually interacts with the site.

A graph showing JavaScript fetch, parse, and compile loading phases
JavaScript fetch, parse, and compile loading phases (Image credit)

Total Blocking Time (TBT) helps quantify the severity of how non-interactive a page is prior to it becoming reliably interactive. And Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) highlights how often users experience unexpected layout shifts (reflows) when accessing the site. All these metrics will appear in Lighthouse v6 as it starts rolling out in 2020.

Additionally, you can look into FrustrationIndex that looks at the gaps between metrics instead of looking at them individually, ad weight impact and Component-Level CPU costs. Note that First Meaningful/Contentful Paint are being replaced with Largest Contentful Paint, and the role of SpeedIndex has decreased with new metrics showing up.

The Impact Of Performance Optimization

It’s no secret that performance has a direct impact on user experience and business metrics and that sometimes, even a seemingly small web performance optimization like shaving off a few milliseconds load time can lead to a better conversion rate. To demonstrate this impact, WPO Stats collects case studies and experiments from products and e-commerce sites — stories of successes and of things that went wrong. Inspiring!

UX Speed Calculator
An open-source visualization tool that helps explain the relationship between page speed, conversion and bounce rates. (Image credit)

To support your performance optimizations with some hard figures and help you better grasp their impact, Sergey Chernyshev built the UX Speed Calculator. It lets you see how speed distribution, error rate, bounce rate, and conversion rate intertwine for the values you enter. A handy little helper.

Automatically Compress The Images In Your PRs

Image optimization is probably one of the easiest tasks on your performance optimization checklist. However, if you have a lot of images to optimize, it can also take up quite some time, and in the hurry, some images might even make it into production skipping this step.

Image Actions
“State of the Web: Video Playback Metrics” by Doug Sillars (Image credit)

To change that, the team at Calibre built a GitHub action that automatically compresses all the JPEGs, PNGs, and WebP images in your pull requests. It’s fast, efficient, and, for near-lossless compression, it uses the best image compression algorithms available: mozjpeg and libvips. A real timesaver.

Resources To Stay On Top Of Performance

A lot of people in the web community are committed to performance and to helping spread the word about it. One of them is Tim Kadlec. In his podcast Chasing Waterfalls, he invites people who work to make the web faster for everyone. Three episodes have already been released, with Reefath Rajali sharing insights into PayPal’s performance journey, Malek Kalim exploring how to scale a culture of performance across an organization, and Katie Hempenius talking about performance budgets, third-party challenges, JavaScript, and a lot of other things that impact performance.

Chasing Waterfalls podcast hosted by Tim Kadlec
Conversations with the people working to make the web faster for everyone, hosted by Tim Kadlec. (Image credit)

Another handy resource to keep you on top of web performance comes from Ben Schwarz and Karolina Szczur. Together they curate the Performance Newsletter, delivering web performance tools, talks, and other resources to your inbox twice a month. There’s also an archive of previous newsletter issues for you to catch up on until the next issue will be sent out.

Each and every issue of the Smashing Newsletter is written and edited with love and care. No third-party mailings or hidden advertising — you’ve got our word.

The Smashing Cat exploring new insights, at Smashing Workshops, of course.

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Smashing Editorial (cm, vf, ra, il)