httparchive.org VS web-vitals

Astro didn't capture the data themselves, it's data from The HTTP Archive.

Based on HTTP Archive real-world performance data (Lighthouse, P90) • Read the full report

A longstanding problem in the HTTP Archive dataset has been extracting insights from blobs of HTML in BigQuery. For example, take the source code of example.com:

The data for this chart came from the wonderful httparchive.org. Tools used to make the chart: Python, Pandas, Matplotlib.

First of all, web development hasn't really evolved that much in the last decade, or it all depends on what you mean by “evolved”. Sure, there’s webpack and React and ES6, but according to data from httparchive.org the median page load time has remained about the same over the past 10 years, even though internet speeds have been steadily increasing, along with rapid advancements in hardware. So it’s safe to say that the internet is faster, but websites aren’t. In addition, as the team behind the Skypack utility has pointed out, “building for the web has never been more complicated.”

The technologies you use to build your website can have an effect on your ability to deliver good user experiences. Good UX is key to performing well with Core Web Vitals (CWV), a topic which is probably top of mind for you, as it is for many other web developers now that these metrics play a role in Google Search ranking. While web developers have had tools like Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to get data on how their sites are performing, the web community has been lacking a tool that has operated at the macro level, giving us something more like WebSpeed Insights. By combining the powers of real-user experiences in the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) dataset with web technology detections in HTTP Archive, we can get a glimpse into how architectural decisions like choices of CMS platform or JavaScript framework play a role in sites' CWV performance. The merger of these datasets is a dashboard called the Core Web Vitals Technology Report.

One of the main things that affect performance and is not so easy to optimize in a web application is assets such as images and videos. Images form almost half of all web content, and so optimizing them goes a very long way to improve experiences with applications. Images are unique because they are not usually compressed in an optimal way and they load all at once on the web and so the Next team decided to solve this. An image component in Next abstracts and enables images to be optimized without any input from you, the developer. Great right? All you have to do is replace the img element with Image from Next. Here is how it is done. Let’s say your image tag is like this:

The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse audits for approximately 7.2 million websites every month. In the May 2021 dataset, Lighthouse was able to identify an LCP element in 97.35% of the tests. Since we have the ability to query all of these Lighthouse test results, we can analyze the result of the LCP audits and get more insight into what drives this metric across the web.

A good place for data around this is the HTTP Archive (https://httparchive.org/). It has collected data and reports.

Google Core Vitals now represent the most important metrics to focus on when it comes to technical SEO. Google Core Vitals are a set of standardized metrics that Google uses to evaluate the user experience offered by a web page and assign it a technical SEO grade. Several tools exist to measure and report technical SEO performance, but the most reliable is Google Lighthouse.

-https://www.patterns.dev/ -https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/blob/main/text/0188-server-components.md -https://dev.to/this-is-learning/qwik-the-post-modern-framework-3c5o -https://dev.to/this-is-learning/astro-framework-169m -https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering-on-the-web -https://web.dev/vitals/

Image source: https://web.dev/vitals/

You will be pleased to know that isn’t actually the case and it’s a suite of metrics instead known collectively as core web vitals https://web.dev/vitals/

Let's go back to 2020, this was when Google made a big change regarding their performance rating -- they introduced the Core Web Vitals. I want to discuss this timeframe because it was the last point where there is clear comparable data between the performance metric set (5 metrics) and the Core Web Vitals (3 metrics). The Core Web Vitals is a subset of the performance metric set.

Beyond elevating the user experience, another clear benefit of speeding up the rendering of a website is search engine optimization (SEO). Speed is so important to ranking well on search engines that it’s included in Google’s published description of what their indexers use to rank websites for performance, called Core Web Vitals.

This is something we won't ever be able to measure, as it depends on how people perceive the overall experience on their device, but it boils down to perceived performance. So by all means, optimize your mobile apps and web frontends, test on old devices and slow networks (even if only emulated), and monitor their real-user performance (e.g. through Web Vitals). As part of performance testing, have a look on electricity use, as it will both be directly associated with emissions to produce that electricity, and be perceptible by the user (battery drain). And don't forget to account for the app downloads as part of the overall perceived performance: light mobile apps that don't need to be updated every other day, frontend JS and CSS that can be cached and won't update several times a day either (defeating the cache).