More Weight Doesn’t Mean More Wait

April 19, 2015

design / performance / programming / user experience

When I talk about web performance, I like to use the phrase, “weight does not need to increase wait.” To be clear, that’s not because the weight of a webpage doesn’t matter—it most definitely does—but rather because we can often (usually, even) deliver a usable representation of a web page’s content very quickly, even if that page is quite large and asset-heavy as a whole. At the root of this distinction is a performance metric that the web community has only recently begun to discuss and prioritize, known as perceived performance.