My Performance Budget

I’m a big fan of Brad Frost. He has tremendously great ideas that I try to incorporate to my daily tasks. One of his best is the idea that performance is an essential part of a product’s design.

I read a lot, and I like to look for patterns in the things that I read. Contrary to popular belief, you can put anything on the Internet you want. If a choice needed to be made between an off-the-wall recommendation that no one else shares and a tip that I’ve seen multiple different source recommend, well, it’s a pretty obvious choice.

If you’re not concerned about the performance of your website, you’re doing it wrong. Over 50% of my personal reading is done on an iPhone with a sometimes spotty connection. If a website doesn’t load quickly, then I’ll go on to something else.

Quickly is something all web developers need to focus on. Per smart people at Google and Amazon:

Amazon’s calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second, they could lose 8 million searches per day–meaning they’d serve up many millions fewer online adverts.

If everyone from Brad to Sergey to Jeff says to pay attention to performance, you need to pay attention to website performance.

My performance budget is simple, measurable, and actionable. From a cold cache, my blog needs to load in less than two seconds. From a primed cache, less than one second. Period.

Saying something and doing something are two very different things. Over the next few blogs, I’ll talk about some of the decisions I made to get my website within my own budget.

For now, look at this initial test I ran:

Yeah, over 1.5 Megs transferred and almost 7 seconds to complete. Totally unacceptable, and totally my fault.

There is nothing as humbling as making a mistake, and being able to blame only yourself. There is nothing as rewarding as being the one in charge, and making something work better than anyone else could.

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