Author Barry Pollard

May 9, 2022 — At the end of 2021, the Chrome team shipped some functionality that has the ability to make or break sites meeting the Core Web Vitals. So, let’s learn a little bit more about the Back/Forward Cache (aka bfcache), and what you can do to test if your website is compatible with it. Read more…

March 7, 2022 — Using signals to deliver less, or different, content is a form of progressive enhancement (or graceful degradation depending on how you look at it), whereby extraneous content is only loaded when necessary, but the core functionality of the website still works. In this article, we’ll look at some of the signals that can be used for this. Read more…

December 20, 2021 — How to improve Core Web Vitals, a Smashing Magazine case study on how we detected and fixed the bottlenecks, and how we ended up with green scores, all the way. Read more…

June 2, 2021 — Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative has taken the SEO and Web Performance worlds by storm and many sites are busy optimizing their Page Experience to maximize the ranking factor. The Cumulative Layout Shift metric is causing trouble to a lot of sites, so let’s have a look at ways of addressing any issues for that metric. Read more…

May 25, 2021 — Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts. Read more…

April 19, 2021 — How are Core Web Vitals measured? How do you know your fixes have had the desired effect and when will you see the results in Google Search Console? Let’s figure it out. Read more…

March 9, 2020 — To prevent layout shifts and improve performance scores, we need to always set width and height attributes on our images. Here’s why and when it matters. Read more…