The fastest website is the website that is already loaded, and that’s exactly what HTTP caching delivers. HTTP caching is a powerful technique that lets web browsers reuse previously loaded resources like pages, images, JavaScript, and CSS without downloading them again. Understanding HTTP caching headers is essential for web performance optimization, but misconfiguration can cause big performance problems.

GTMetrix used to be the go-to tool for checking website speed, but let’s be honest—paying for one-off synthetic tests isn’t worth it. If you’re still relying on synthetic testing alone, you’re missing a big part of the web performance picture. If you care about Core Web Vitals, SEO performance, and user experience, you need more than just lab data. The good news? There are better (and free) alternatives like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest for synthetic testing.

HTTP/3 is here, and it’s a big deal for web performance. See just how much faster it makes websites! Wait, wait, wait, what happened to HTTP/2? Wasn’t that all the rage only a few short years ago? It sure was, but there were some problems. To address them, there’s a new version of the venerable protocol working its way through the standards track. Ok, but does HTTP/3 actually make things faster? It sure does, and we’ve got the benchmarks to prove it.

Images are big. Really big. The bytes required for an image dwarf most site’s CSS and JavaScript assets. Slow images will damage your Core Web Vitals, impacting your SEO and costing you traffic. Images are usually the element driving Largest Contentful Paint and load delays can increase your Cumulative Layout Shift. If you’re not familiar with these metrics, check them out in the Definitive Guide to Measuring Web Performance.

At Request Metrics, we’re always looking for ways to help you make your websites faster and your users happier. Today, we’re excited to announce a major new capability: Unified Performance Monitoring. Request Metrics now combines the power of real-user monitoring with automated lab performance testing to get a complete picture of your website’s performance.

You’ve found some Long Animation Frames (LoAFs) impacting your site, now you need to fix them! LoAFs can make animations feel sluggish, delay user interactions, and generally reduce your site’s responsiveness, all of which contribute to a frustrating experience for users. Fortunately, by analyzing LoAF data and addressing common performance bottlenecks, you can dramatically improve how smoothly your site runs.

Your website’s performance can make or break your business. Slow load times, crashes under pressure, and a poor user experience can cost you customers, reduce your search engine rankings, and hurt your bottom line. That’s why monitoring and testing your site’s performance is critical—but not all performance monitoring is the same. At Request Metrics, we focus on Real User Monitoring (RUM), which shows you how real users are experiencing your website in real-time.

A Long Animation Frame, often called a LoAF, occurs when your website’s animations take too long to render, slowing down interactions and making your site feel “frozen” or “janky.” And yes, it’s hilarious that it sounds like a loaf of bread—so get ready for plenty of bread, butter, and toasting puns! You might be thinking, “I’m building an online store (or whatever), what do I care about animations? I’m not talking about cartoons.

Everyone in web performance talks about CrUX—what the heck is it?! CrUX, or the Chrome User Experience Report, is Google’s initiative to measure how websites perform for their real users. It’s not just another test, it’s a window into the actual experience people have when they visit a site. Wait—didn’t Googlebot and PageSpeed Insights already do this? Are they going away? Not exactly.

What is the slowest part of your website? Most of the time, it’s the resources: all the CSS, fonts, images, and JavaScript that powers your webpage. Resources that are too big or too slow are often the root cause of slow Core Web Vitals. This week, we’re releasing a bunch of new tools and reports to better understand your web resources, how they impact your website performance, and where you have opportunities to improve.