Overview
The average website loads over 1.5MBs of content per page, making over 75 requests. Many popular websites are serving over 5MBs just to load their homepages. And these numbers represent measurements taken AFTER compression is applied. The full weight of many popular websites is pushing 20+ MBs these days. In an era where performance truly matters to the end user experience, web developers need techniques to help curtail this bloat in data down the wire.
No matter how well you optimize, there is no better way to than to delete things you do not need. How does one determine what is essential to the user experience and what is not? One answer Chris posits is to develop a hyper-lightweight version of your website which will provide critical insights into your specific performance priorities. This is a process that he has leveraged on many projects, in particular at YouTube to reduce the size of the video watch page from 1.5MBs to 100KBs. In this talk, Chris will take real-world web pages and show techniques for dramatically reducing their page weight and for identifying areas to optimize, while outlining the key steps to doing this well.
Objective
Learn a process for building a hyper-lightweight version of your website for establishing reasonable performance budgets, grounded in reality, to work from.
Target Audience
Web developers
Assumed Audience Knowledge
HTML, CSS, Javascript, some server-side awareness.
Level
Intermediate
Five Things Audience Members Will Learn
- How to analyze a web page for performance issues
- A holistic approach to deconstructing an existing website
- A clear process for building a hyper-lightweight version of your website
- Translating your findings into real performance priorities
- Establishing a realistic performance budget
