the **spiciest** web performance leaderboard would rank saas company home pages making “blazingly fast”-esque claims
put those INP and TBT scores in big bold letters
It should be fair to post screenshots like this for companies that tout “the fastest frontends” on their home page—especially notable that this is *not* a temporary regression. It’s been like this for a long time—why is no one talking about it?
Here’s the source code between the doctype and the <title> for this site:
×26 <link rel="preload">
×36 external <link rel="stylesheet">
×91 external <script src>
This is not a nuanced point I’m making. We’re not debating the finer points of complicated web performance trade-offs. This is a very slow web site.
“This doesn’t look good” indeed.
@zachleat I do love the idea of holding marketing teams to the same standards as their product… at a minimum (a marketing site *should* be way, way easier to make fast and accessible)
It's not just their marketing site. All of Vercel's claims fall apart as soon as you open Chrome and turn network throttle to "Fast 3G": https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1735338533303259571
@zachleat I have found that the real indictment is the showcase section of these sites. The speed of the things they choose to crow about reflects the lived values of these orgs.
@slightlyoff $300M buys a lot of marketing momentum
@zachleat If only it bought speed.
@slightlyoff I used to think the go-to metaphor was trucks https://fediverse.zachleat.com/@zachleat/110181262326744689 but now I think I’m going to use US passenger rail—slow, ineffective, expensive…
@zachleat RSC SSG prerender edge blazing fast AI PPR shadcn
Do you want more buzzwords or should I stop there?
@zachleat What do you mean that's slow? We're doing what you said right, splitting everything into chunks! Look how cacheable it is! HTTP/2 says it's good! Why don't you like it Zach! Why! Why! Why!
@zachleat What kind of intrigues me is that on 4G throttling and up, it really does feel fast, which I wasn’t expecting given all the server calls. HTTP/2 packing the calls into a single connection, I guess?
On Good 3G throttling and below, though, it really is deeply painful.
@Meyerweb The digital divide! I do think that there is a larger point worth making, as Vercel heavily invests in LLM automation of front-ends—automating this level of quality will only exacerbate the divide
The other point I’d make is that Network throttling is only one piece. Testing on a slow device is another thing entirely.
@zachleat @Meyerweb I’ve been working on an article calling for an inflation rate for the FCC’s definition of broadband. This is a great example of how the web gets more bloated not just in raw transfer size, but in bad habits that hamper limited data plans at an outsized rate. The 25 megabit plan of 5 years ago is slower to use today.
@slightlyoff @zachleat More like treo.sh/itespeed/, amirite? HEEEYOOOOO
@zachleat it’s a lot on the initial load, yes, but what you have to understand is that once all that is executed, it’s still slow.
@theadmiral this broke me
@theadmiral @zachleat I was getting angry until the last few words. Glad I persevered.
@robjwood @theadmiral we all went on this roller coaster together
@zachleat post this on the bird site... I dare you
@ryantownsend you->
<- me
where’d the go
@zachleat "Script tags are my passion"?
I've been doing (aka raging, ranting etc.) it for a while now on Twitter.
The result is a few retweets, and complete silence (or blocks) from the people responsible for this.
Latest is Googlers congratulating each other on the merger of Angular with amazing extremely performant innovative internal Google library called Wiz that, among other things, powers Youtube.
@zachleat I would imagine there are some recommendations for number of bytes before <title> too. Considering that so much stuff in head affects parsing behavior? Should want to get to it quickly so UA can render it in tab/window etc.
@zachleat “Let's add some code to make it faster.”
@zachleat I’m impressed.
This is art.