CHAPTER 4 Culture of Performance
Clearleft, a Web design agency in Brighton, UK, wrote about their expe-
rience using a performance budget^13 and came to this same conclusion:The important point is to look at every decision, right through the design/
build process, as something that has consequence. Having a pre-defined ‘bud-
get’ is a clear, tangible way to frame decisions about what can and can’t be
included, and at a suitably early stage in the project. It can also potentially
provide some justification to the client about why certain things have been
omitted (or rather, swapped out for something else).Setting a budget provides this justification and framework for dis-
cussion, and continues to do so throughout the life cycle of the site. Keep
enforcing the budget after launch as a way of avoiding the slow creep of
bloat that tends to manifest itself.Be Realistic
The entire point of the performance budget is to provide a very tangible
point of comparison, so be explicit about it. Something like “a maximum of
500KB in size and no more than 15 HTTP requests” is what you’re aiming for.
And be realistic about it. Setting a budget that is either unhelpfully
high (“No more than 5MB!”) or unrealistically low (“No more than 10KB!”)
does you absolutely no good. Be strict, but understanding of reality.
It’s also worth noting that third-party services like ads, while essential
for businesses, can single-handedly destroy a performance budget.For those scenarios, it makes sense to categorize the assets on the page.
Developers at the Guardian newspaper came up with three categories^14 :13 http://smashed.by/responsive-budget
14 http://smashed.by/re-page-load