Announcing Test Profiles and Budgets 2.0
Calibre can emulate real-world devices, connection speeds, and more
It’s been about 7 weeks since the last update, but this wait will have been worth it. Today marks the most significant and powerful release that Calibre has ever seen. 💪
I’ll take you through new features available today and give a sneak peek into exciting releases on the horizon.
🔬 Test Profiles
Regularly monitoring performance already puts you ahead of the competition, but have you ever wished emulating real-world conditions was easier and more accessible? Low powered mobile devices (with those slow, slow CPUs 😫), or limited connection speeds? Maybe you’ve wanted to compare a site with–or–without those 3rd party ads?
You’re going to love Calibre Test Profiles.
A Test Profile consists of the following:
- The device you’d like to emulate (this will change the screen dimensions, slow the CPU down, and set the user-agent).
- Bandwidth limiting (latency, download and upload kbps)
- Cookies that are set for each session
Once you’ve edited a test profile, Calibre will test the site under the prescribed conditions. I don’t want to make a big deal about it, but it’s kind of… like ✨ magic. ✨
On the surface, cookies just sound delicious 🍪😋—why is this so revolutionary?
You could use cookies to:
- Create an authenticated session.
- Disable advertising to ease troubleshooting of developer-specific regressions.
- Test against an A/B test or a staff-only feature.
🤔 Ok great, does my plan support Profiles?
Yes! Every plan we offer is made more powerful with the addition of Profiles.
- ‘Starter’ plan includes 1 test profile per site — you can edit the device, bandwidth settings, or set cookies to your heart’s content.
- ‘Power’ and ‘Pro’ plans have 5 test profiles per site — in fact, we’ve already gone to the liberty of adding a ‘iPhone 6, 3G connection’ profile to each of your sites! (go and have a look 😱)
- Finally, if you’re on one of our excellent 🏢 ‘Enterprise’ deployments, then you can have as many run profiles as you want. It’s entirely up to you.
If you’re a bit unsure about what this all means, please check our pricing page, our test profile docs, or write to us at hello@calibreapp.com
What else is new?
💗 Updated Pulse Dashboard
The ‘Pulse’ dashboard has seen a bit of a refresh to make way for Test Profiles. With multiple run profiles, you’ll see all devices compared to each other.
🔬 Metrics in depth
Tapping the ‘View Metric’ button will take you to a full six months of history, as well as showing how the metric has changed at given intervals. Analysing improvements and regressions is much easier.
⏱️Budgets 2.0
There’s little doubt that setting a performance budget is the best way to keep in touch with changes to website performance. Now, with Calibre Budgets 2.0, you can set a budget against chosen pages, and test profiles.
Once you’ve setup a budget, the inevitable happens 💥 — budget is blown 😳. Everyone on your team will get an email, which is great, but these alerts can also be pushed into Slack. You’ll see a nifty render-in-progress gif of the page in question.
👍 The roundup:
- Performance: Calibre should be feeling snappier than ever.
- Test profiles: Test your site using different devices and connection speeds.
- Budgets 2.0: Set, Edit and Delete Budgets. Set budgets against pages and run profiles.
- Updated Slack notifications.
- Updated Budget alert emails. (with those fancy GIFS).
- New site GIF renders.
- Click from a timeline chart to the snapshot. Subtle, but so happy to have this long standing bugbear (🐛🐻?) fixed!
A sneak peak at what is coming next: Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of your web apps.
Lighthouse can be run as a Chrome extension, from the command line, or used programmatically as a Node module. But, like all other browser extensions or CLIs, they need to be run manually. Well, you will be happy to know that full-blown Lighthouse support is coming to Calibre soon. If you’re building a Progressive Web Application (PWA), or just looking for more depth in your performance metrics, then you’ll be right with Calibre. 🏖️
👏 Supporting Calibre
If you too, think this release was ‘kind of a big deal’, and you want to help us continue building Calibre, please consider ✍️ signing up for a plan, ❤️ clicking up-vote on Medium, 🐦 tweeting or even shouting 🗣 “Calibre” to the sky. Your support is absolutely needed, valued, and appreciated.
We have so much more that we’re excited to share with you as we continue our mission to make the Web fast for everyone. 🌍🌏🌎
