Speed Matters talk at Auckland Web Dev Nights

Here's the slides from my presentation at the Auckland Web Dev Nights meetup. It's an overview of why front-end performance matter, how to monitor it and the challenges faced when building for an increasingly mobile world. 

Content

Why speed matters, examples of the impact saving a few seconds of load time has had on revenue and engagement. The network constraints and what makes the web slow? Bandwidth, latency and it's fundamental impact on the speed of the web. An overview of tools for measuring performance, uptime monitoring, real user monitoring and performance benchmarking. How to make your website faster. Optimization tools and techniques. Muti-device challenges. Responsive vs Adaptive and delivering to mobile within a second. Drop that donut superman!

Performance Tools

Diagnotic Tools
WebPagetest and how to read a browser waterfall
Google Pagespeed Insights
YSlow

Uptime Monitoring
Pingdom

Competitive Benchmarking
SpeedCurve

Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Pingdom
New Relic (also backend, database and server health monitoring)
Google Analytics
mPulse

Performance Checklists

14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites
25 tips on how to lose weight in the browser

References

Impact of performance improvements
Optimizing the Critical Rendering Path for Instant Mobile Websites (Video)
What are responsive websites made of?
Responsive web design is solid gold
Etsy - Building Resilient User Experiences
Velocity Conference Videos
Browser Diet References

Credits

These slides are heavily derived and mangled from awesome presentations by Andy Davies and Ilya Grigorik. Illustrations by Scott Johnson via Browser Diet. Feel free to steal it, adapt it and spread the word on front-end web performance.