Performance Newsletter |
OPEN SOURCE
Google Lighthouse 2.0 lands in Chrome Canary
Lighthouse is an Open Source project led by the Google Devtools team providing an automated way to improve quality and performance of websites and apps. It offers incredibly actionable advice on how to deal with performance and accessibility bottlenecks as well as building Progressive Web Apps.
Just in time for Google I/O Lighthouse shipped in Google Canary under the Audits tab. Alternatively, you can use the Chrome extension, a Node module or the CLI tool. Want to avoid customising your pipeline for continuous monitoring? Scroll down to the end of the email, we have a treat for you 🍬
OPEN SOURCE
Create React App enables Progressive Web Apps by default
Create React App, a powerful Open Source React boilerplate, now supports Progressive Web Apps by default. New apps will employ Service Workers and offline-first caching strategies out of the box. Alongside with code splitting, this change might have a tremendously positive impact on overall performance on the Web, taking into account React’s popularity.
It’s great to see others following the suit too—Vue.js announced their PWA support shortly after. Congratulations all around 👏
OPEN SOURCE
Hacker News PWA: A successor to TodoMVC
TodoMVC probably helped countless developers to pick their MV* framework in its time. In the hard-to-keep-up-with landscape of JavaScript, it seemed like we needed something new to look up to.
HN PWA is a showcase of unofficial React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, Angular, viperHTML and Polymer implementations of the Hacker News client. Check out the source code and learn 🎓
RESOURCES
Progressive Web Apps Stats
Progressive Web Apps are quickly taking off. The quantifiable impact on user experience might be difficult to assess though, let alone convince undecided business owners. Fortunately, lovely folks at Cloud Four are managing a list of successful case studies.
Need more stats? Don’t miss Web Performance Optimisation Stats as well 📈
CASE STUDY
A faster FT.com
Performance in the publishing industry is still far from ideal but there’s a flickering light at the end of the tunnel. Financial Times, totalling almost 900,000 paid subscribers, recently ran an A/B test to prove the negative impact of slow websites on user engagement. The results are fascinating!
Head to Financial Times increases engagement with personalisation and speed for a detailed list of performance improvements they’ve made 💨
RESOURCES
Article Performance Leaderboard
Staying on the subject of publishing, Michael Donohoe created a fun leaderboard of article pages tested on a 3G connection. Comparing metrics such as Visually Complete, Page Size and Number of Requests, the results feature some surprising contenders.
Kudos Michael ⚡️
NEW IN CALIBRE
Continuous Google Lighthouse Support
Since you’ve learned about Lighthouse earlier in the email, I’m excited to announce that Calibre is the first service to run continuous PWA, accessibility, performance and best practices tests as a part of its suite. With an A-F grading system, keeping an 👀 on the benchmarks has never been more straightforward.
Lighthouse introduces several user-focused metrics that will empower you to understand which aspects of performance have a real impact on customers. Start building PWAs today!
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