performance budget

We’ve written 2 blog posts about performance budget. View all topics »

1. 

   Grunt Plugins Reviewed

   

   7/17/14

   by Cat Farman

   The movement towards designing with performance budgets in mind has inspired more fist pumps and vuvuzela bleating in this developer than the recent World Cup. Thinking through the ramifications of design choices for site performance makes it easier for me to build a fast website when development begins.

   But when it comes to testing against budgets, we’ve been measuring page weight and rendering times manually, using tools like WebPageTest.org and Yahoo’s YSlow. Relying on humans to run tests has meant we don’t always measure our performance consistently, therefore missing page weight hogs like the occasional stray Blingee. There has to be a better way, right? A curious client got us wondering how we could automate our performance testing.

2. 

   Designing with a (Performance) Budget

   

   5/29/14

   by Katie Kovalcin

   Lately, the web industry has been focusing on ways to improve performance—specifically, by applying the idea of a “performance budget.” A performance budget involves establishing a target page weight (usually in kilobytes), and then making sure no single page exceeds that value. While sticking to this number may seem like a developer’s burden to bear, as Mark Perkins puts it, “performance is everyone’s problem.” As a designer, it’s important to keep your budget in mind throughout your entire process—all the way from discovery through implementation. When both designers and developers work closely to set and stick to a budget, a sweet spot will emerge where neither performance or design will be compromised.