Barry Pollard's Blog
June 26, 2023
What does the image decoding attribute actually do?
An in-depth look at the decoding attribute and how it affects web performance differently when using sync, async or not at all
May 23, 2021
What we learned about Core Web Vitals from Google IO
The 2021 Google IO event had a number of presentations about Core Web Vitals so what did we learn from them up the upcoiming page experience ranking?
March 10, 2021
Making the slowest 'fast' page
Can you make a webpage which gets 100 score in Lighthouse and passes all the Core Web Vitals and still feels slow?
October 3, 2020
What do Lighthouse Scores look like across the web?
An in-depth look at Lighthouse scores across the 6.8 Million sites the HTTP Archive crawled in September 2020
March 9, 2020
Setting Height And Width On Images Is Important Again
Thanks to some recent changes in browsers, it's now well worth setting `width` and `height` attributes on your images to prevent layout shifts and improve the experience of your site visitors.
January 12, 2020
Should you self-host Google Fonts?
A deep dive into the performance implications of using Google Fonts (good and bad) and whether self-hosting is better.
December 3, 2019
Running Lighthouse in GitHub Actions
How to set up automatic runs of Ligthouse audits on pull requests using GitHub actions.
Helping to create the Web Almanac
The story behind the HTTP Archive Web Almanac from one of it's contributors.
August 5, 2019
Critical Resources and the First 14 KB - A Review
Do you really need to optimise as much of your critical page into the first 14 KB of your HTML for TCP reasons? Or does that not hold true in an HTTPS world?
May 25, 2019
Adding controls to Google Tag Manager
12 tips to enforce control to secure Google Tag Manager (GTM) and prevent security or performance problems
