A practical checklist for performance budgets
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Run through this the next time performance budgets comes up.
Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
The checklist
- A number in writing stops slow creep
- Budget for total page weight and script size
- Enforce it automatically or it gets ignored
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
What it costs to ignore
A number in writing stops slow creep. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
The short version
Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Three things worth confirming about performance budgets before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Budget for total page weight and script size — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.