Web Performance in Action: Building Faster Web Pages

The content of the web is maturing and increasing in complexity, but internet infrastructure quality varies widely across the globe. People are browsing the web through a greater variety of devices and networks than ever before. Your website’s visitors may be browsing via resource constrained connections, or limited by restricted data plans. Due to these hard realities, it’s more important than ever that your website loads quickly, lest you alienate your visitors before they ever get a chance to see what your site has to offer.

Web Performance in Action is your companion guide to making websites faster. Throughout the course of this book, you’ll learn techniques that speed the delivery of your site’s assets to the user, increase rendering speed, decrease the overall footprint of your site, as well as learn how to build a workflow that automates common optimization techniques. You’ll also get a look at new technologies such as HTTP/2 that will take your website’s speed from merely adequate to seriously fast.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Understanding web performance
Chapter 2. Using assessment tools
Chapter 3. Optimizing CSS
Chapter 4. Understanding critical CSS
Chapter 5. Making images responsive
Chapter 6. Going further with images
Chapter 7. Faster fonts
Chapter 8. Keeping JavaScript lean and fast
Chapter 9. Boosting performance with service workers
Chapter 10. Fine-tuning asset delivery
Chapter 11. Looking to the future with HTTP/2
Chapter 12. Automating optimization with gulp
Appendix A. Tools reference
Appendix B. Native equivalents of common jQuery functionality