WebExpo 2023: Talks on Speed Optimization

This year's WebExpo has concluded. It was beautiful. It was intense.

I'm a big fan of the cross-disciplinary aspects of this web conference. But when something about speed pops up in the program, you can bet I'm in the front row.

WebExpo is already releasing recordings, so you can check out several talks that touched on speed and hone your optimization skills.

Harry Roberts: Optimising Largest Contentful Paint#

When Harry comes to town, we go see Harry. It’s a rule. The former CSS expert known as CSS Wizardry is now fully immersed in performance. His talks are always a deep dive into a specific topic.

If you know nothing about the LCP metric, watch this. And know that you probably don't know as much about the Largest Contentful Paint metric as you think. Of all the Web Vitals, LCP meets recommended limits on the fewest sites. Even I learned a few new things from Harry's talk, like the importance of the decoding attribute on images that are LCP elements.

Scott Jehl: Experimenting with Performance at the Edge#

The first part of this talk will appeal to those who are still unconvinced that web speed is worth addressing. Expect plenty of useful numbers, graphs, and arguments that might finally convince your boss or client that speed matters.

After a lengthy introduction, Scott showcased Experiments in WebpageTest, which allow you to test the impact of code changes on speed directly on a production site. It's very intriguing, so definitely give it a try.

Martin Michálek: Shift Happens: Dealing with Cumulative Layout Shift (Case Study)#

I must invite you to watch the recording of my own talk, which is always a bit tricky for me. In twenty minutes, I attempted to demonstrate the detailed knowledge needed to optimize the new and less explored CLS metric.

I illustrated this with a case study of work for our lovely client – Goldea.cz. Some optimizations we handle quite easily, but here we broke a sweat and learned quite a bit about Cumulative Layout Shift ourselves.

Do you know which tools to use to measure CLS and why not to use Lighthouse? Do you know what CLS does with flexbox in navigation and what a scrollbar on Windows does? My talk will answer that for you.

Two other talks pleasantly surprised me, touching on the topic of web speed:

• Ondřej Čermák: How to Make Sure Your System Doesn’t Blow (Up) - scaling for performance might not always help. The key is to measure well. Exactly! And one more thing – watch out for queues.

• Server-Side: The Newest Website Tracking Concept: Pavel Šabatka - well-presented arguments on why to consider server-side GTM, how to roughly do it, and what it costs. It's simpler than I thought, and it can quite nicely help with speed.

It was great. See you at WebExpo 2024!

But we'll meet sooner at Reshoper 2023, on May 17th, 2023.

Tags:PageSpeed.czWeb Performance