Building faster webpages for Core Web Vitals

The post explores how frontend developers optimize landing page speed according to Google's Core Web Vitals, which are critical for search ranking and user experience. Core Web Vitals focus on three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which collectively assess webpage performance from a user's perspective. The author details methods to enhance these metrics, such as throttling connections to identify issues, reverse-engineering successful pages, and maintaining server response times under 600ms. By analyzing 114 mobile pages, the author identifies key performance patterns across different technologies like Next.js, WordPress, and Ruby on Rails. Strategies include setting a performance budget, preconnecting to domains, preloading and self-hosting fonts, using inline SVGs, and lazy loading images. The post also advises on managing third-party scripts efficiently and highlights innovative practices like using the picture element for hero images. These recommendations are grounded in data-driven insights from the Google Chrome User Experience Report, aiming to help developers build faster and more responsive web pages.