There’s a lot going on in the web performance space, especially since the introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals, and 2023 is no exception.
Flashback to this year which saw the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as well as new advances in browsers. Let’s discover together how these developments open up new perspectives for developers and SEO professionals.
Oh INP my INP, tell me who is the most responsive
In 2022, Google introduced the new experimental metric Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to measure how quickly websites respond to user interactions more reliably than FID.
In May 2023, Google announced that INP would replace the legacy First Input Delay metric as a Core Web Vitals metric in 2024. Core Web Vitals are a set of user experience metrics that Google uses as an SEO ranking signal.
If the INP replaces the FID it is because it improves the measurement of interactivity in two ways:
- INP looks at all interactions on the page instead of just the first one
- INP measures the entire duration of the interaction instead of just measuring the time between the interaction and the start of treatment
Chrome DevTools also introduced some useful changes to better debug slow interactions by adding more information about the distribution of times in the INP calculation:
So get ready, the arrival of spring will also herald the arrival of the INP!
Some have already started and are getting ahead of their peers/competitors.
Better support for speed features by browsers
New features to optimize and measure web page speed are often first integrated into Chrome. However, it usually takes some time for them to be adopted by other browsers.
In 2023, several notable improvements were implemented in browsers other than Chrome:
- Largest Contentful Paint can now be measured in Firefox
- For its part, Safari has integrated the management of the response status code “103 Early Hints”, which allows early loading of resources while the server prepares its response.
- Safari also adopted the fetchpriority attribute , allowing developers to signal priority images directly in the HTML code.
A major change to image priorities in Chrome
When a website loads, a whole symphony of data is orchestrated. The browser begins its score by downloading the HTML document, before carefully scrutinizing the code to identify the essential resources: style sheets, scripts, images, etc.
Within this HTML page, a real universe of images can exist. Some are essential, enthroned at the top of the page, others more discreet, nestled at the bottom of the page or hidden behind a secret menu. However, for the browser, these images remain enigmatic: it cannot detect their importance just by analyzing the HTML code.
Faced with this dilemma, the browser’s default choice has always been to treat all images equally, giving them low priority. Only when the page comes to life on the screen, revealing the visible images, does the browser adjust their priority.
The fetchpriority attribute allows developers to inform the browser about important images directly in the HTML. But not all sites leverage it.
As a result, Chrome is changing the way images are prioritized in October 2023. Now, the top five images on a page will be assigned a “Medium” priority right from the start, a subtle but powerful change. This new approach aims to quickly identify key images, improving Largest Contentful Paint, without requiring additional changes from developers.
Video frames now factored into LCP measurement on Chrome
LCP is a key metric for evaluating web performance, measuring when the most meaningful content appears on screen. Traditionally, this content was limited to text or static images.
However, the digital media landscape is evolving, and videos represent a crucial dimension of the user experience. Until Chrome version 116, a video impacted the LCP only if it was accompanied by a cover image (the poster attribute ), a notable limitation in taking into account the richness of multimedia content.
Since August 2023, Chrome has taken a significant step forward. Now, the moment when the first frame of a video appears is taken into account in the calculation of the LCP. This approach also extends to animated GIFs and PNGs, which were previously only evaluated when the entire frame was loaded.
Your CrUX history finally available thanks to Google API
The Chrome User Experience (CrUX) report is packed with Core Web Vitals data collected from real users, and is a treasure trove of insights even if it only covers a portion of your audience.
Tools like PageSpeed Insights already offer a glimpse into this data, showing an average of Core Web Vitals over the past 28 days. But for those who crave a deeper, more ongoing understanding of their site’s performance, the CrUX History API opens up new possibilities. By providing detailed data over the past 25 weeks, it offers a valuable window into your site’s evolution and progress, making performance tracking more accessible and informative than ever before.
And 2024, then?
We’ll stop you right there, we don’t have a crystal ball. What we do know, however, is that the INP will continue to generate a lot of discussion with its arrival in the spring and the difficulty in optimizing it. We have observed it in recent months, the INP of sites is not looking good. And in our opinion, the challenge of 2024 will be precisely there! The question of dependence on the JS will therefore arise very quickly. Indeed, if the FID was not very discriminating until now, the situation changes with the INP and sites will have to redouble their efforts to comply.
Logically, this should push many tools to make optimizations in this direction:
- JS Frameworks will need to do what is necessary to ensure that less JS is downloaded directly from their framework, otherwise their customers will be driven to other frameworks.
- Third Parties, already aware, will most likely be challenged even more by their customers to limit their impacts on Core Web Vitals.
The good news is that these collective efforts, both from frameworks and third-party services, will benefit the entire web, contributing to an overall improvement in performance. Classic optimizations will of course remain essential and will need to be adopted more widely. In short, 2024 should also contribute to a more efficient web!
How to optimize web performance in 2024?
Navigating the complex world of web performance in 2024 is a major challenge:
- with increasingly rich and sophisticated web pages,
- the constant evolution of optimization techniques, browsers and recommended practices,
- not forgetting the diversification of user behavior.
In this context, significantly improving the loading speed of your pages and maintaining optimal web performance over time becomes a path strewn with pitfalls.
The multitude of analysis tools and recommendations for web performance, although varied, does not always guarantee relevance adapted to each context. Putting these tips into practice can turn out to be a real expedition.
It is precisely to meet this need that we created EdgeSpeed more than 10 years ago: to take action and concretely optimize your web pages.
EdgeSpeed brings together, coordinates and organizes all web performance optimization techniques into one holistic solution. Think of EdgeSpeed as your web performance command center, built by experts.
With EdgeSpeed, you can enable, disable, and meticulously configure each optimization in just a few clicks, all supported by a dedicated expert to maximize your site’s performance.
To meet the webperf challenges of 2024, EdgeSpeed offers in particular:
- Advanced features for Core Web Vitals optimization, including efficient image prioritization.
- Track your Core Web Vitals (and many other metrics) right from the dashboard.
- As well as an innovative SmartINP feature, currently in beta, which promises to significantly improve your Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
With EdgeSpeed, you can approach this new year with peace of mind and benefit from unprecedented web performance.
Don’t wait any longer to discover the impact EdgeSpeed can have on your site. Request a demo now and explore the untapped potential EdgeSpeed has to offer: