Web performance
By Andy Davies
Learn why performance matters, and pick up practical techniques to make smoother pages that load faster.
Web pages are getting larger and slower to load, and we seem to be relying on browser and network improvements to rescue us. Visitors have expectations that pages should be faster. By stretching their patience, there's a danger they will spend less time on our sites, visit fewer pages and buy less.
In this book, Andy Davies will guide you through why performance matters, what we can use to improve it, why these methods work, and some of the trade-offs involved. You'll learn practical techniques to improve website performance and be introduced to approaches that you can experiment with.
Performance affects visitor engagement. In this section we'll look at the impact performance improvements have.
So, faster is better, but what performance techniques should every site be using, and how easy are they to implement?
Images typically represent 60% of the download size of the average webpage. Choosing an appropriate format and optimising it are crucial to reducing an image’s size.
Different devices have different capabilities. Adapting the content we deliver can improve performance too.
Performance isn't just about how quickly pages load - what also matters is how smoothly they scroll and whether they stay responsive as we interact with them.
Andy Davies is associate director for web performance at NCC Group.
When he's not helping clients measure and improve the performance of their sites, or talking about the importance of speed, he can probably be found down the bottom of the garden on his vegetable patch.
“There's a common misconception that to make sites load faster we need more powerful servers, or our visitors need faster connections”
Andy Davies
