Measuring performance
Measuring performance provides an important metric to help you assess the success of your app, site, or web service.
For example, you can use performance metrics to determine how your app performs compared to a competitor or compare your app's performance across releases. Your metrics should be relevant to your users, site, and business goals. They should be collected, measured consistently, and analyzed in a format that non-technical stakeholders can consume and understand.
This article introduces tools you can use to access web performance metrics, which can be used to measure and optimize your site's performance.
| Prerequisites: | Basic software installed, and basic knowledge of client-side web technologies. |
|---|---|
| Objective: |
To provide information about web performance metrics that you can collect through various web performance APIs and tools that you can use to visualize that data. |
Performance tools
There are several different tools available to help you measure and improve performance. These can generally be classified into two categories:
- Tools that indicate or measure performance, such as PageSpeed Insights or the Firefox Network Monitor and Performance Monitor. These tools show you how fast or slow your website is loading. They also indicate areas that can be improved to optimize your web app.
- Performance APIs that you can use to build custom performance tools.
General performance reporting tools
Tools like PageSpeed Insights can provide quick performance measurements. You can enter a URL and get a performance report in seconds. The report contains scores indicating how your website performs for mobile and desktop. This is a good start for understanding what you are doing well and what could be improved.
At the time of writing, MDN's performance report summary looks similar to the following:
A performance report contains information about things like how long a user has to wait before anything is displayed on the page, how many bytes need to be downloaded to display a page, and much more. It also lets you know if the measured values are considered good or bad.
webpagetest.org is another example of a tool that automatically tests your site and returns valuable metrics.
You can try running your favorite website through these tools and see the scores.
Network monitor tools
Modern browsers have tools available that you can use to run against loaded pages and determine how they are performing; most of them work similarly. For example, the Firefox Network Monitor returns detailed information on all the assets downloaded from the network, along with a waterfall time graph that shows how long each one took to download.
You should also check out Chrome's Network Monitor documentation.
Performance monitor tools
You can also use browser performance tools such as the Firefox Performance Monitor to measure the performance of a web app or site's user interface as you perform different actions. This indicates the features that might slow down your web app or site.
See also Chrome's Performance tool documentation.
Performance APIs
When writing code for the Web, many Web APIs are available to create your own performance-measuring tools.
You can use the Navigation Timing API to measure client-side web performance, including the amount of time needed to unload the previous page, how long domain lookups take, the total time spent executing the window's load handler, and more. You can use the API for metrics related to all the navigation events in the diagram below.
The Performance API, which provides access to performance-related information for the current page, includes several APIs including the Navigation Timing API, the User Timing API, and the Resource Timing API. These interfaces allow the accurate measurement of the time it takes for JavaScript tasks to complete.
The PerformanceEntry object is part of the performance timeline. A performance entry can be directly created by making a performance mark or measure (for example by calling the mark() method) at an explicit point in an application. Performance entries are also created in indirect ways, such as loading a resource like an image.
The PerformanceObserver API can be used to observe performance measurement events and to notify you of new performance entries as they are recorded in the browser's performance timeline.
While this article does not dive into using these APIs, it is helpful to know they exist. Refer to the Navigation and timings article for further examples of using performance Web APIs.