Introducing Insights in Chrome DevTools Performance panel! Many web developers know the power of the Chrome DevTools Performance panel, but navigating its wealth of data to pinpoint issues can be daunting. While tools like Lighthouse provide great summaries, they often lack the context of when and where issues occur within a full performance trace. On the Chrome team we're bridging this gap with the new "Insights sidebar" directly within the Performance panel. Read all about it: https://lnkd.in/gGd3bkPw This exciting feature integrates Lighthouse-style analysis right into your workflow. After recording a performance trace, the Insights sidebar appears, offering actionable recommendations. Crucially, it doesn't just list potential problems but highlights relevant events and overlays explanations directly on the performance timeline. Hover over an insight like "LCP by phase," "Render blocking requests" or "Layout shift culprits" to visually connect the suggestion to the specific moments in your trace. The sidebar covers key areas like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) optimization (including phase breakdowns and request discovery), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) analysis (like DOM size impact and forced reflows), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) culprits, and general page load issues such as third-party impact and image optimization. It's designed to make performance debugging more intuitive by linking high-level insights to the granular data, helping you improve Core Web Vitals and overall user experience more effectively. Check out the Insights sidebar in the latest Chrome versions (it's been evolving since Chrome 131!). It’s a fantastic step towards making complex performance analysis more accessible. Give it a try on your next performance audit! #softwareengineering #programming #ai
Tools For Analyzing Website Performance
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Summary
Tools for analyzing website performance help you measure how quickly your site loads, how stable it appears to users, and how responsive it feels. These tools highlight areas for improvement, allowing you to create a smoother experience that keeps visitors engaged and improves your search engine ranking.
- Monitor key metrics: Track Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to understand how your site loads, stays stable, and responds to user actions.
- Try specialized tools: Use resources like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and GTmetrix to uncover performance issues and receive practical recommendations for faster site loading.
- Test in real-world scenarios: Check your website speed from different locations, devices, and time periods to ensure visitors everywhere enjoy a reliable experience.
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Every Web Developer should know Lighthouse: Lighthouse is an audit of tools that help you provide the best user experience for your website. A good user experience is essential for a successful online presence. Learn about Lighthouse and why you should use it. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool developed by Google that you can run directly in your web browser, or as part of your continuous integration pipeline. It audits your web app for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. Here’s why every web developer should incorporate Lighthouse into their development workflow: 1. Performance Optimization Lighthouse provides a performance score along with actionable recommendations on how to improve your website's loading time, interactivity, and visual stability. By following these suggestions, you can ensure your site offers a fast, responsive user experience, crucial for retaining visitors and improving your site’s overall engagement. 2. Accessibility Checks Ensuring your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, is not just a moral imperative but also a legal requirement in many jurisdictions. Lighthouse runs a series of automated tests to check for common accessibility issues and provides guidance on how to address them, helping you to make your site more inclusive. 3. SEO Improvements SEO is key to increasing a website's visibility in search engine results. Lighthouse audits your site for SEO best practices, offering insights into how you can improve your page’s ranking. This includes checks for metadata, mobile-friendliness, and more. 4. Best Practices Beyond performance and accessibility, Lighthouse also checks for adherence to modern web development best practices. This includes everything from HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios. Implementing these best practices ensures your site is built on a solid foundation. 5. Progressive Web App (PWA) Assessment Lighthouse can evaluate your site against the criteria for progressive web apps, providing a checklist of features that turn your web app into a PWA. 6. Easy Integration Lighthouse can be run in various environments: in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a node module. This flexibility means it can easily fit into your existing development and testing workflows. Additionally, integrating Lighthouse into your CI/CD pipeline helps catch issues early and automatically. 7. Continuous Improvement As web standards evolve, so does Lighthouse. It's regularly updated to reflect the latest in web development practices, meaning you’re always auditing your sites against the current standards and technologies. Incorporating Lighthouse into your development process is a step towards excellence in web development
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Core Web Vitals should matter to not just SEO experts, but anyone interested in scaling D2C Often your product is great, and your ads are getting people to your site, but good chunk of them bounce before even seeing the second image Or worse, your D2C site ranks below third-rate aggregators on Google despite having a better brand, better product, and better reviews on keywords you should own One big reason could be that your site experience sucks. And that’s exactly what Core Web Vitals is trying to measure. These aren’t vanity metrics. They’re Google’s way of telling you that your user experience is frustrating. And we won’t reward it with visibility Here’s what Core Web Vitals actually mean (without jargon): •LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) = How long your main visual/image takes to load. If it’s >2.5s, it’s a problem •CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) = Does the screen jump around while loading? If buttons shift while the user tries to click, it’s hurting conversions •INP (Interaction to Next Paint) = How fast your site reacts to taps/clicks. If there’s a delay when they hit “Add to Cart”-bad news. Think of it this way: •LCP = First impression •CLS = Does the page feel stable? •INP = Is it snappy? Why should founders/CMOs care? Because these metrics directly affect 3 things: 1. Organic traffic (SEO): Google demotes slow and clunky sites. Doesn’t matter how good your content or backlinks are 2. Conversion rate: People bounce when images load late, or buttons move as they click 3. Ad ROAS: Your performance marketing team is paying to drive traffic to a broken experience. You lose money before the user even evaluates the product How to check your Core Web Vitals: Free Tools: •PageSpeed Insights •Lighthouse Ideal Benchmarks in my opinion: •LCP < 2.5s •CLS < 0.1 •INP < 200ms If you are doing everything else right- good products, good marketing, good creatives etc, don’t let slow LCP and messy CLS undo your good work
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The Truth About Website Speed Tests Most tools are lying to you. Want to know why your site's still slow? Because you're using the wrong tools... In the wrong way... And focusing on the wrong metrics. Let me show you what actually works: ✅ The Only Speed Tools That Matter Forget the fancy dashboards. These are your new best friends: → Google PageSpeed Insights (Because Google actually uses this) → GTmetrix (For the technical deep dive) → WebPageTest (For real-world testing) Everything else? Nice to have, but not essential. ✅ The Metrics That Actually Impact Revenue Stop obsessing over "page load time." Focus on these instead: → Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Must be under 2.5 seconds → Time to First Byte (TTFB) Keep it under 200ms → Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Below 0.1 or customers bounce ✅ The Action Steps That Work Most tools give you a list of 50+ things to "fix." Here's what actually moves the needle: ✨ Compress those massive images ✨ Upgrade your cheap hosting ✨ Use a solid CDN ✨ Enable browser caching ✨ Lazy load everything else Real companies saw real results... A Brisbane e-commerce site: • Cut load time from 6.2s to 1.8s • Reduced bounce rates by 21% • Boosted conversions by 14% ✅ The Monitoring That Matters Don't trust single tests. Test from multiple: • Locations • Devices • Time periods Because one good score doesn't mean your site's actually fast. The Truth? Your website speed is probably worse than you think. But here's the good news: You don't need perfect scores. You need real-world performance that: • Keeps visitors engaged • Reduces bounce rates • Drives more sales Stop chasing perfect scores. Start chasing perfect performance. Because in 2025... Speed isn't just about fast loading. It's about faster revenue. Do you agree? :)
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Debugging frontend performance has always been hard. But debugging performance traces? That’s a different beast altogether. 1.Network waterfalls. 2.Main thread flame charts. 3.Long tasks. 4.INP breakdowns. 5.Random unattributed blocks eating CPU time. Most devs open DevTools, stare for 30 seconds, then give up even me. because performance traces are dense, visual, and brutally context-heavy. But now there's Never Been a Better Time to Use AI Instead of manually parsing through Chrome DevTools data, I can now: ✅ Get instant insights on INP, LCP, and CLS metrics ✅ Identify bottlenecks in seconds, not hours ✅ Receive actionable optimization recommendations ✅ Understand complex network traces with plain English explanations Here's how to get started: 1️⃣ Open Chrome DevTools (F12 or Cmd+Option+I) 2️⃣ Navigate to the Performance or Network tab 3️⃣ Click on "Console" and look for the AI assistance option (sparkle icon ✨) 4️⃣ Record your page performance or capture network activity 5️⃣ Ask the AI to analyze metrics like INP, LCP, or identify bottlenecks 6️⃣ Get instant, actionable insights in plain English If you're still debugging the old-fashioned way, give AI-assisted debugging a try. Your future self (and your users) will thank you. #WebDevelopment #AI #PerformanceOptimization #ChromeDevTools #DeveloperTools
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Technical SEO Tip: You can use Screaming Frog + the PageSpeed Insights API to audit your site's performance data at scale. Here's the process: One of the features that I feel isn't talked about enough in Screaming Frog is their "API" integration functionality. With API integrations, you can connect Screaming Frog to a lot of external tools. This includes GA4, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and even LLMs like OpenAI and Gemini. This gives you incredible powerful to use Screaming Frog to blend your crawl data with third party sources. One super useful review I've found myself doing over the years is using the PageSpeed Insights API to quickly review a site's performance data: 1. Open up Screaming Frog 2. Navigate to Configuration > API Access > PageSpeed Insights 3. In the "Account Information" tab - connect your PageSpeed Insights API key. Click the link in Screaming Frog and click "Get A Key" to create a new project. You'll get the API key here. 4. Copy/paste the API key in the "Secret Key" field 5. In the "Metrics" tab, configure the metrics you want to scrape into Screaming Frog. You can scrape in a TON of data such as Core Web Vitals, PSI recommendations, page elements breakdowns and more. 6. Click "OK" and start your crawl on Spider mode 7. In the "PageSpeed tab", you'll be able to see your performance data. This is super useful when you want to analyze your performance data across the entire site quickly. You won't need to manually plug URLs into PageSpeed Insights. Instead, you'll have Screaming Frog do the work for you. Also super useful for analyzing and comparing competitor performance data.
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In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve requires not just the latest trends, but also the right tools. While popular platforms like Hootsuite and Google Analytics get all the love, I want to highlight some hidden gems that deserve a place in your marketing arsenal: 1. Screaming Frog: This free SEO spider tool crawls your website like a search engine, uncovering technical SEO issues like broken links, missing meta descriptions, and duplicate content. It's a fantastic way to identify and fix these issues, boosting your website's health and search visibility. 2. Wappalyzer: This browser extension instantly reveals the technologies used to build any website. Identify CMS platforms, marketing automation tools, analytics software, and more, gaining insights into your competitors' tech stack and potentially sparking inspiration for your own strategies. 3. Keywords Everywhere: This browser extension integrates seamlessly with search engines, displaying valuable keyword data like search volume, competition, and related terms directly on the SERP. It's a fantastic tool for on-the-go keyword research and content ideation. 4. Lighthouse Speed Test: Built into Google Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse is a free tool that audits your website's performance and provides actionable recommendations for improvement. By optimizing your website speed, you ensure a smooth user experience and potentially improve your search engine ranking. These tools, while not as widely discussed, can be incredibly valuable assets in your digital marketing toolkit. Remember, the best tools are those that help you achieve your marketing goals efficiently and effectively. What are your hidden gem marketing tools? Share them in the comments and let's expand our collective knowledge! #digitalmarketing #marketingtools #SEO #leadgeneration #competitoranalysis #keywords #websiteperformance
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Thinking about a website redesign? Use these 7 free tools first to make smarter decisions. Your website is one of your most important sales tools. But if it’s slow, unclear, or difficult to navigate, it could be quietly costing you qualified leads. For industrial companies, where buying cycles are long and decisions are made by committees, a well-performing website is essential. Before you invest in a redesign or marketing campaign, use these 7 free tools to benchmark your site’s performance: �� Google PageSpeed Insights → Lighthouse → Responsively App → Hotjar (Free Plan) → Ahrefs Webmaster Tools → GTmetrix → WAVE Web Accessibility Tool These tools don’t just reveal technical problems. They help uncover the friction points that prevent buyers from taking the next step. --- Follow Michael Cleary 🏳️🌈 for more tips like this. ♻️ Share with a team that needs a smarter redesign plan.
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Two months into implementing #Auditzy RUM for a leading #eCommerce brand, everything seemed steady, until it wasn’t 😅 . During a high-stakes campaign with a surge in traffic, conversions quietly started dipping. No one could explain why. There were no deployment issues. No downtime. No major visual bugs. But something was broken. That’s when Auditzy™ - Real Time Website Speed & Core Web Vitals Monitoring Tool’s stepped in, and surfaced the real problem within hours: A massive spike in Interaction to Next Paint (INP) across the site. Mobile INP shot up. Desktop wasn’t spared either. 😑 From product discovery to “Add to Cart” to payments — every interaction had a noticeable delay. What users experienced: 👉 Taps that didn’t respond instantly 👉 Navigation lag 👉 Checkout steps that felt frustratingly slow The campaign was live. Traffic was high. Every second mattered. Auditzy™ - Real Time Website Speed & Core Web Vitals Monitoring Tool didn’t just detect the issue, it visualized the problem 👉 Page-by-page, journey-by-journey 👉 Real user data, not synthetic guesses 👉Split Website Performance trends by OS, Device, Browser, and Network Speed The culprit? A third-party script injected as part of a plugin update — unnoticed by traditional monitoring. 🔥 Thanks to this visibility, the brand’s engineering team acted fast. ✅ INP stabilized. ✅ User journeys recovered. ✅ Revenue leakage was prevented mid-campaign — not after. This is what real-time, real-user performance monitoring looks like. This is why brands choose Auditzy — not just to monitor, but to protect experience when it matters most. P.S. If you are an online commerce brand, let's talk! I would love to share our learnings with your engineering team! #CoreWebVitals #INP #WebPerformance #RealUserMonitoring #EcommerceTech #PageSpeed