What is a performance budget?

Performance-based budgeting establishes a relationship between program expectations and expected results from that program. It's meant to establish a balance between how awesome you can make something look and how much overhead it will take to actually serve that something up.

Performance budgets can also help administrators, designers and developers understand how a digital product will stack up against its competition.

Do I need one?

It depends. Maybe. Probably.

Depending on what your website or application does or which devices you are targeting, a performance budget may be essential to your process. If it puts your organization in a less reactive state and in a more predictive space, it's probably a good thing to do.