Getting started with performance budgets
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to performance budgets for teams who have not touched it before.
Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The reason this keeps coming up
A number in writing stops slow creep. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Budget for total page weight and script size
- Change one thing and measure it
Enforce it automatically or it gets ignored. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
The short version
Speed is a feature people notice only in its absence, and then they leave rather than complain. Three things worth confirming about performance budgets before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Enforce it automatically or it gets ignored — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.