Getting Up to Speed with Web Performance

Websites may be slow, but the web itself moves fast. Every day new techniques and tools emerge, promising to make your site faster and lighter. New articles are written about the latest "best practices" in performance, only to have yet newer articles contradict them. When the technologies and techniques we use to make websites more performant change so quickly, it's easy to feel like you're falling behind.

But if you pull back the layers and the hype, drilling into the core concepts of how the network and browsers we rely on actually work, it suddenly becomes much easier to recognize which best practices are actually appropriate for you, and what trade-offs you're making.

In this workshop, we'll go beyond the latest and greatest techniques and tools to understand what is going on at the core. We'll explore:

• How the browser renders pages, from the very first request on the network to the final pixel on your screen
• What the critical rendering path is and how to optimize for it
• How HTTP/2 differs from HTTP/1 and what that means for popular opimizations
• How to identify common performance bottlenecks in your sites and applications

By the time we're done, you'll have a firm understanding of what makes sites fast, and how to separate the hype from reality. After the workshop, you should be confident attending and keeping up with all the discussions both on-stage and off-stage at #PerfMattersConference.

About Andy Davies

Andy is an Independent Web Performance Consultant and is fascinated by both the technical aspects of performance, its effect on user behaviour and impact of site success. He has helped some of the UK's leading retailers, newspapers and financial services companies make their sites faster. He is co-author of Using WebPageTest published by O'Reilly and author of The Pocket Guide to Web Performance (which you can download for free). You can find him sharing his thoughts in a briefer format on Twitter at @andydavies.

About Tim Kadlec

Tim is a performance consultant and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use. He is the author of High Performance Images and Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web, and was a contributing author for Smashing Book #4: New Perspectives on Web Design, and the Web Performance Daybook Volume 2. He writes about all things web at timkadlec.com. You can find him sharing his thoughts in a briefer format on Twitter at @tkadlec.