Data-s(h)aver strategies

On 10th September 2019 at Cloudflare London as part of LWP September: Saving data and the web perf quiz

More and more people are making use of the data saver mode built into their browser. As website owners we should listen and serve a lightweight version when the data-saver request header is present.

I’ll share the approaches, trade-offs and results from my journey shaving off bytes on scalemates.com. With around 30K daily visitors it is the largest scale modeling website in the world.

I have been using performance budgets for many years, but the new light version (consuming 50% less bandwidth on an iPhone) unexpectedly broke this model. I will also address how the use of a data budget matrix solved the issues I faced.

Session video