Querying the HTTP Archive and finding your Performance Plateau
In this episode, Paul Calvano dives deep into querying the HTTP Archive dataset to uncover web trends, while Tammy Everts breaks down the "Performance Plateau", explaining why identifying your specific threshold is critical and how to find it.
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Introduction to the HTTP Archive
The HTTP Archive is an open source project that tracks how the web is built and how it's evolved. The archive contains information on ~15 million websites, with monthly data for some sites as early as 2010! The data from the HTTP Archive is frequently used for research by the web community and scholars, and also used to produce the annual Web Almanac. During this session Paul will provide an overview of the HTTP Archive and demonstrate how to get started querying it.
Paul Calvano (he/him) is a Performance Architect at Etsy, where he helps optimize the performance of their marketplace. He has been helping websites optimize their performance since as early as 2000. He is also a co-maintainer of the HTTP Archive and a co-organizer of the NY Web Performance Meetup.
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Why you need to know your site’s performance plateau (and how to find it)
Have you ever asked yourself these questions?
- "I made my pages faster, but my business and user engagement metrics didn't change. WHY???"
- "How do I know how fast my site should be?"
- "How can I demonstrate the business value of page speed to people in my organization?"
The answers might lie with identifying and understanding the performance plateau for your site.
Tammy Everts (she/her) has spent the past two decades studying how people use the web. Since 2009, she’s focused on the intersection between web performance, user experience, and business metrics. Her book, Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance from O’Reilly, is a distillation of much of this research. Formerly CXO of SpeedCurve, which was acquired by Embrace in 2025, Tammy is now Senior Director of Community at Embrace.
