The Web Performance Collection

Performance simply matters. Technology may allow us to “go bigger”, but maybe not necessarily be better when it comes to performance. Now is the time to utilize the amazing tools that are available to us for making websites and applications faster, and to learn how to improve user experience and satisfaction.

This collection contains four books:

• Front-end Performance is a collection of practical articles on front-end website performance for front-end developers. It’s packed with useful, real world hints and tips that you can use on your sites today.
• Back-end Performance is a collection of articles on back-end website performance for web developers. It outlines useful strategies and practical advice.
• Performance Tools contains tutorials on some of the most popular and powerful website performance tools available.
• Performance Project contains a series of practical, real-world tutorials, all based around a single project: a simple image gallery blog. We’ll build the project, and then run through a series of performance optimization processes; by the time we’re done, we’ll have achieved very significant performance improvements.

This collection is for developers who wish to build sites and apps that run faster. You’ll need to be familiar with HTML and CSS and have a reasonable level of understanding of JavaScript in order to follow the discussion, and for book 2, Back-end Performance, you’ll need some understanding of server-side development.

Table of Contents

Book 1: Front-end Performance
Chapter 1: Which Browsers Should Your Website Support?
Chapter 2: Are Your WordPress Themes Flexible or Fast?
Chapter 3: Five Techniques to Lazy Load Images for Website Performance
Chapter 4: Optimizing CSS: ID Selectors and Other Myths
Chapter 5: Optimizing CSS: Tweaking Animation Performance with DevTools
Chapter 6: Lightning Fast Websites with Prefetching
Chapter 7: Optimizing Web Fonts for Performance: the State of the Art
Chapter 9: JavaScript Performance Optimization Tips: An Overview
Chapter 9: 7 Performance Tips for Jank-free JavaScript Animations
Chapter 10: What Is a CDN and How Does It Work?

Book 2: Back-end Performance
Chapter 1: How to Optimize MySQL: Indexes, Slow Queries, Configuration
Chapter 2: How to Read Big Files with PHP (Without Killing Your Server)
Chapter 3: WordPress Optimization
Chapter 4: HTTP/2: Background, Performance Benefits and Implementations
Chapter 5: Apache vs Nginx Performance: Optimization Techniques
Chapter 6: An In-depth Walkthrough of Supercharging Apps with Blackfire
Chapter 7: How to Boost Your Server Performance with Varnish
Chapter 8: How to Process Server Logs

Book 3: Performance Tools
Chapter 1: 23 Development Tools for Boosting Website Performance
Chapter 2: Improving Page Load Performance: Pingdom, YSlow and GTmetrix
Chapter 3: PHP-FPM Tuning: Using pm static for Max Performance
Chapter 4: Optimization Auditing: A Deep Dive into Chrome’s Dev Console
Chapter 5: Performance Auditing: A Firefox Developer Tools Deep Dive
Chapter 6: Web App Performance Testing with Siege: Plan, Test, Learn

Book 4: Performance Project
Chapter 1: Building an Image Gallery Blog with Symfony Flex: the Setup
Chapter 2: Building an Image Gallery Blog with Symfony Flex: Data Testing
Chapter 3: PHP-level Performance Optimization with Blackfire
Chapter 4: MySQL Performance Boosting with Indexes and Explain
Chapter 5: Improving Performance Perception with Pingdom and GTmetrix
Chapter 6: Improving Performance Perception: On-demand Image Resizing
Chapter 7: Using Background Processing to Speed Up Page Load Times
Chapter 8: Server-side Optimization with Nginx and pm-static
Chapter 9: How to Use Varnish and Cloudflare for Maximum Caching