Performance3 min read
Web animation performance: keeping motion smooth on real devices
Animation is cheap on a MacBook and expensive on a three-year-old Android. Only one of those is your audience.
Web performance guides on Core Web Vitals, LCP, INP, CLS, image and font optimisation, bundle size and rendering cost.
Animation is cheap on a MacBook and expensive on a three-year-old Android. Only one of those is your audience.
A landing page is one argument made in the right order. Most fail on the first line.
Three numbers, each measuring a different way a page can feel bad: slow to appear, slow to respond, and unstable while you use it.
LCP is not one number, it is four phases. Optimising the wrong one is why so much performance work produces no measurable change.
INP is the metric that exposes how much JavaScript you shipped. A page can load in a second and still feel broken when tapped.
CLS is the most fixable Core Web Vital. Almost every point of it comes from an element that did not tell the browser how big it would be.
Bundle size is the cost you pay on every visit, on every device. It is also the one performance metric that only ever grows unless someone owns it.
Fonts are usually the second-largest asset on a page and the most common cause of text that appears late, then jumps.
Images are usually the largest thing on a page. Format and compression choices routinely cut that weight in half with no visible difference.
Every third-party tag runs on your main thread, in your users' browsers, with your performance budget. Almost none of them have an owner.
Performance work that happens once decays within two quarters. A budget makes it a constraint every pull request has to respect.
A perfect Lighthouse score and failing Core Web Vitals is not a contradiction. They measure different things, and only one of them is your users.
No spam. Just the occasional case study and craft breakdown.