What is Web Performance? - Explanation & Meaning
Learn what web performance is, how Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) work, what performance budgets are, and which optimization techniques improve your website speed.
Definition
Web performance is the discipline focused on measuring and improving the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of websites and web applications for an optimal user experience.
Technical explanation
Web performance is measured via Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast the largest visible content loads (target <2.5s), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness to user interactions (target <200ms), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability by quantifying unexpected layout shifts (target <0.1). Optimization techniques include: inlining critical CSS to prevent render-blocking, optimizing images via modern formats (WebP, AVIF) and responsive loading with srcset, JavaScript code splitting and lazy loading, server-side rendering or static generation for fast First Contentful Paint, and resource hints (preload, prefetch, preconnect) to inform the browser about upcoming resources. Performance budgets define maximum limits for JavaScript bundle size, Time to Interactive, and transfer size. Real User Monitoring (RUM) collects data from real users, while synthetic tests via Lighthouse and WebPageTest provide controlled measurements. Edge caching and CDN configuration reduce latency. HTTP/3 and Brotli compression improve transfer speed.
How MG Software applies this
MG Software maintains strict performance budgets for every project. We measure Core Web Vitals via Vercel Analytics and Google Search Console, automatically optimize images with Next.js Image, and use code splitting to keep JavaScript bundles minimal. Our sites consistently score 90+ on Lighthouse.
Practical examples
- An e-commerce site that improves LCP from 4.2s to 1.8s by implementing lazy loading for product images and inlining critical CSS, resulting in 12% more conversions.
- A news portal that uses a performance budget of 200KB JavaScript and automatic bundle analysis in the CI/CD pipeline to prevent new features from degrading load times.
- A SaaS dashboard that loads only the components of the active tab via code splitting, reducing initial load time from 6 seconds to 1.5 seconds.
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
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