Smart advice from Harry on setting performance budgets:
They shouldn’t be aspirational, they should be preventative … my suggestion for setting a budget for any trackable metric is to take the worst data point in the past two weeks and use that as your limit
This is a very useful new feature in Calibre, the performance monitoring tool. Now you can get data about just how much third-party scripts are affecting your site’s performance:
The best way of circumventing fear and anxiety around third party script performance is to capture metrics that clearly articulate their performance impact.
I like Tim’s definition here:
A performance budget is a clearly defined limit on one or more performance metrics that the team agrees not to exceed, and that is used to guide design and development.
And I agree about the four attributes required for a performance budget to succeed. It must be:
- Concrete
- Meaningful
- Integrated
- Enforceable
The point is not to let the performance budget try to stand on its own, somewhere hidden in company documentation collecting dust. You need to be proactive about making the budget become a part of your everyday work.