From Development to Real Users: How to Create a Web Performance Story

This post details Spotify's methodology for creating a 'web performance story' by combining lab and real user data. It introduces the use of Lighthouse CI integrated into Backstage for pull request feedback, emphasizing its role in comparing metrics against master and visualizing trends. The post highlights the necessity of field data to complement lab data and discusses key Web Vitals metrics (LCP, FID, CLS) and other supported metrics (FCP, TTFB, INP). It also describes the integration of Google Analytics export to BigQuery for real-time monitoring dashboards and presents a case study of Server Side Rendering (SSR) for the mobile web player to illustrate how data validates performance improvements and guides further investigation.