By Tim Kadlec CHAPTER 4- Content
- Enhancement
- Leftovers
Content is the meat and potatoes: it’s why the user visits your site. The
enhancements are the dressing: the JavaScript and styling that make the
experience nicer. And the leftovers, well, that’s the scraps you give to the
dog underneath the table, the stuff the user doesn’t care about. Those are
the things that should come last in the load process; give the user what
they want first, and then load in the excess after the fact.
Until ad networks and other services get with the program and start
creating faster services, you may need to have your budget apply to the
content and enhancements only. Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t
be diligent about limiting those third-party performance drains. It sim-
ply means we sometimes have to concede that certain pieces of the page
remain out of our control.
a few woRDS of CauTion
Performance budgets are an excellent way to ensure performance remains
part of the discussion. But, as we saw earlier, the budget must be set early
on. If you get halfway through a project before setting a budget, you are
going to have a difficult time convincing anyone it is important enough
to pay attention to. Not to mention that by then, there may already be
approved visuals or features that immediately crush whatever budget you
may have needed to set.
The other important thing to note: when you set the budget, and as you
enforce it, you should already know what content needs to be on the page.
A performance budget is meant to help you decide how to display your con-
tent, not what content to display. Removing important content from a page
is not a performance strategy.