A web performance audit checklist
Making a website faster is a surprisingly easy thing to do; you only need to decide that you’re going to do it.
Oh and also you need to do it.
Having reviewed and improved the performance of many a web site, I’ve settled on a repeatable set of steps that apply universally. You may not be surprised to hear that these steps are the topic of this article.
The benchmark device
If I’m going to make a site faster, I must be able to reliably report on how fast it is. So for consistency I run the site locally, with the network throttled to ‘Fast 3G’ in Chrome DevTools (otherwise requests are too fast to measure). I don’t throttle the CPU for the practical reason that I’m going to be refreshing the site hundreds of times each day. If I have to wait 15 seconds each time I’ll set myself on fire and jump out a window before I finish making the site fast. And that’s bad for performance.
I’m not concerned with ‘real user metrics’; measuring a site’s performance in the real world is great, but it doesn’t help in the process of making it faster.
Instrumentation
‘Time to Interactive’ is the metric I’m most interested in, since TTI represents the point at which a user can start using the site. I’ll find the point in the code…
