I have confused feelings about the result I just achieved. I’d like opinions. Should I keep it, should I revert.
To my already combined .js file residing in the head, I combined two additional javascripts which were originally further down the page. The overall load time has improved by a 100 or 200 ms, but the Start Render time has worsened by about 200 ms. I’m undecided if I should revert this modification, or leave it as is.
Make sure you do a bunch of runs of both configuration (10) to make sure you don’t catch an outlier, particularly when you’re measuring a page that’s this fast.
Try capturing video of both and comparing to see what the user experience is like but my gut tells me to revert because the start render is much more important to the user experience than the page-load metric (if the late-loading javascript doesn’t visually change the page at all then the real user experience is closer to your start render. The video only has a resolution of 100ms though so it might be tight.