Web Performance Back-to-Front

Harry will take you on a journey to help you become a Web Performance expert. Throughout several themes and topics, he will share some of his closest secrets, going from the back- to the front-end, and auditing the performance of real websites. You’ll be plotting data and findings, making it compelling to clients and non-technical stakeholders; drawing up backlogs and hit-lists; hacking on fixes, improvements, and experiments; and learning a lot of forensic, detailed, and often completely obscure performance information on the way. Web Performance Back to Front starts on the server—the back-end—and makes its way to the user—at the very front of the front-end—looking at what parts of the journey can slow us down and what we can do to mitigate it. CDN configurations, TLS performance, protocols, network utilisation, resource scheduling, critical path optimization, asset delivery and optimization, CSS performance, runtime and rendering, caching, and more. The workshop begins with lessons on capturing rich and insightful data, and subsequent modules will be spent with the tooling needed to dissect and analyse it. The workshop ends with discussions around performance culture and monitoring, as well as ideas on how best to present findings and improvements to the business. Everything in between will be intensive, practical learning as we tear down and rebuild your own sites with performance in mind! There is no real script—we’re just gonna get busy. You’ll leave armed with a wealth of knowledge and tools, meaning you can do the whole lot again by yourself, anytime you want.

Notes and comments

Requirements of attendees: • A laptop with an up-to-date version of Chrome. • A live, public-facing website that you will audit and fix. • Access to its Google Analytics account (optional but advised). • User accounts with several online tools. (I will email links to these ahead of time but rest assured, they’re all free and safe.)