Todd's Web Performance Posts

Why Real User Monitoring is more important for web performance than synthetic monitoring, and why it's so hard. Request Metrics tries to combine them both in a single platform.

Todd shares the secret way to make websites faster: do fewer things. Fewer fonts, smaller images, less distance.

I was a guest on Henri Helvetica's SPDY Stream Podcast about web performance. We talked about industry challenges, real user monitoring, and synthetic testing.

GTMetrix was great when it was free, but paying for synthetic tests doesn’t make sense anymore. This post breaks down better alternatives that combine Synthetic Testing, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and Google’s CrUX data to give you a full picture of your website’s performance—so you can fix what actually matters.

Learn how to optimize website images for faster load times, better SEO, and improved Core Web Vitals. This guide covers choosing the right format, compression, lazy loading, responsive images, and caching strategies.

If you’ve noticed your website feeling sluggish or unresponsive—especially during animations—you might be running into Long Animation Frames (LoAFs). LoAFs happen when a browser takes longer than 50 milliseconds to render an animation frame, leading to a janky experience that can frustrate users.