Guides
What actually happens between keypress and pixel
Five stages, one honest read on your rendering pipeline. Here is what each stage costs, what usually stalls it, and the single change that moves your numbers.
Author
chris
45 posts
Guides
Preloading fonts without making everything else wait
A preload tag moves a font to the front of the queue. It also moves everything behind it further back, which is the part nobody mentions.
CSS
Container queries without the rewrite: a seven-day migration
Swapping every media query in one afternoon is why teams abandon container queries. Here is the slower path that gets you there with your sprint intact.
Guides
A migration checklist for teams that cannot stop shipping
Every migration that failed was attempted in one branch. Here is the shape of the ones that landed.
Guides
Bundle math: how much JavaScript you actually need
The 170 KB budget is a number someone tweeted in 2016. Your real number depends on your audience’s devices, their network, and how much of the page arrives as HTML.
Guides
Reading your own analytics before you optimise anything
Half the performance work teams do is aimed at a device nobody in their audience owns.
Performance
Why your site crawls on hotel wifi, and the four fixes that work
Latency ruins a page long before bandwidth does. Ship these four changes and most sites feel instant again by the next deploy.
Guides
Splitting a bundle by route, carefully
Route-level splitting is the easiest win in the bundler and the easiest way to make navigation feel worse.