Advice for shaving seconds off of page loads?

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Hey Jlrving.

welcome to the world of web performance ;). I think I could help you out on that topic and share some of my knowledge and resources that might be handy for you.

I wrote my Thesis about the topic of “Webperformance for mobile end users” and why is the web so slow. I digged into that topic for 6 month and would like to share my findings with you. For the germans of you it is available on github: https://github.com/Andi-Lo/bachelorthesis
Direct link to pdf: https://github.com/Andi-Lo/bachelorthesis/blob/master/thesis/thesis.pdf
(Could load quite a bit because its ~80 pages)

Now most of you are not Germans so I will just give you resources that I found useful for writing this paper:

First of all I think the most crucial part ist to understand how the internet works and when you want to tackle mobile performance how do carrier services work and how does your phone connect to the internet and all that stuff. This will greatly enhance your knowledge of why and how things need to be setup in order to be faster.

Here are some really great books that start with the basics and go really into depth about that topic:

Books:

  • Really deep knowledge and insights into the world of browsers and networking. Lots of pictures with examples and a great read
    High Performance Browser Networking - by Ilya Grigorik (Google) https://hpbn.co/

  • Lara Hogans tackles the question of how you can work on fast websites as a company. That web performance does not come from one programmer doing “webperformance things” but that the company , the design department, all need to get into the same boat to reach the goal. She basically says: When your designers design a website that has 5 big picture sliders, 4 different webfonts and some other shiny things, you’re done with fast loading speed on mobile devices because the design already set the hurdle too high. Really great book. Free on the net http://designingforperformance.com/ Print version: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033578.do or amazon I guess.

  • The book of speed: Provides also good insights but is incomplete. But the first few chapters are quite well done and worth a read: http://www.bookofspeed.com/

  • Tim Kadlec goes more into design aspects but also does speaking and workshops about web performance.
    https://timkadlec.com/me/#books

  • There are 2 other books I would just for completeness mention: I did not read them however
    https://abookapart.com/products/responsible-responsive-design

Resources:

Here are some great speaker decks that have quite some value.

Numbers

If you are in sales and ecommerce (or science ^^) people like numbers. Here are papers and resarch about what page load times do to the users and how they affect them.

Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Spring 2014 http://www.radware.com/assets/0/314/6442478110/c810eee1-e86f-438a-b82f-3ad002bf1c75.pdf

Infografic about mobile load times on ecommerce sites:

The psychology of web performance: Also provides lots of links and resources to other sources.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/psychology-web-performance/

Tools:

  • http://www.perf-tooling.today/ the most complete collection of everything related to web performance. Articles, videos, slidedecks, tools, books etc.

  • The best tool for performance measuring out there is: https://www.webpagetest.org/ because it uses real devices on different locations around the globe. Also the network conditions are real 3g’s or LTE and not just simulated. There are also services and tools that use webpagetest for performance monitoring e.g. https://speedcurve.com/.

  • https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/ Find out how much it costs for someone to use your site on mobile networks around the world.

  • https://www.sitespeed.io/ is an npm package for web performance testing. It uses webpagetest internally but does output really pretty stats and metrics. Can also be used for continous performance monitoring.

People to follow:

@igrigorik
@HTTP_2
@paul_irish
@patmeenan
@perfplanet
Hashtags: #perfmatters #webperf on twitter provide also some constant stream of resources to keep you up to date.

And because it is christmas time:

http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2016/ describes itself as “The speed geek’s favorite time of the year”. It is basically a christmas calender where every day from 1st to 24th of december there will be 1 article about web performance related topics. You can also checkout the ones from the year before. Some really great resources in there.

I hope that does not just help you but anyone here who wan’ts some deeper knowledge about web performance. There is also a lot more stuff and tools out there but those are the things that I found useful and got used to.

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