Why don’t we just use the same metrics for every website, every business? The answer sounds obvious when you first ask—“Because they’re different, duh!”—but that’s an awfully hollow answer. Fundamental questions like this deserve more attention. If every business needs money to survive, why not just measure all businesses by the money ...

What if we translated Core Web Vitals to the restaurant world? What would those metrics look like? Here’s my first stab at it: • Time To Menu: From the moment a customer walks in to the time they can read the menu. • First Waiter Delay: The delay between a customer trying to and actually getting a waiter’s attention. • Cumulative Table...

Why “vitals”? Why measure heart rate when what really matters is winning the race? After all, vitals don’t prove you’re alive, they just say you’re not dead. How do you measure success? In a perfect world, if you could measure anything, how would you measure your performance? Often times, we can’t measure exactly the thing we want. Tak...

Lately I’ve been thinking about what web performance measures, what it could measure, what it should measure… Why load time metrics? Well, for one, that’s all websites used to do! But since then, the Web has grown to do so much more. Are we stuck in the past? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of discussion—especially with Core Web Vital...

The scale and power of the Web today is mind boggling. The number of things you can do with it is, in theory, only limited by the number of things the devices connected to it can do. And today’s technology can do, well, almost anything. (Just imagine the technology of tomorrow!) Someone makes something, puts it on the Web, and all of a...

Well, it’s a global information system. It exchanges information between people. It connects people. It’s a communications system. It is “the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge”. https://www.w3.org/WWW/ “The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportun...

Kinds of performance describe either the things you’re trying to do well (the activities) or the thing you’re trying to make better (the subject). You can measure “financial performance” (how well you do financial things) or “business performance” (how well your business works). The interesting thing about subject-based performance (as...

What is “performance”? And what about performance makes it “web performance”? Because performance comes in kinds. At the very least, we’ve had business performance and economic performance since long before we had the Web. Even if you focus on a single object, you can measure all sorts of different performance for it. For example, a ca...