6 quick things developers can do to improve performance

Advice
By published

If your site's not up to speed then you could be losing users; here are six things you can do right now to get things moving.

Tim Kadlec will be speaking about the importance of creating web experiences that feel fast and frictionless at Generate Bangalore on 2 December. Discover how to reframe performance on the web at his talk, Once more with feeling; book your ticket now!

We're building some pretty fat sites right now. The average site is over 2MB, which is ridiculous – and in many countries very expensive.

Learn how to create sites that feel fast with Tim Kadlec at Generate Bangalore

Learn how to create sites that feel fast with Tim Kadlec at Generate Bangalore

But it's not such a huge problem that it can't be solved. Developers need to build with care to make sure the sites they produce are lean and fast.

Here are six things all developers should be doing to improve the performance of their websites…

  1. Compress your images and serve them at correct size
  2. Minify and compress all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  3. Limit the use of heavy JavaScript. Render as much as you can on the server and use JavaScript to sprinkle on enhancements
  4. Optimise for the critical path so that your content appears as quickly as possible
  5. Start familarising yourself with HTTP/2 because that changes so many things
  6. If you're going to use something like Bootstrap, be sure you remove all the unused CSS in a build process. There's a ton of unnecessary bloat.

Don't miss Tim Kadlec's Generate Bangalore session, Once more with feeling, where he'll discuss techniques and technologies for creating sites that don't just perform well, but feel fast and frictionless too. Buy your ticket today!

Tim Kadlec
Tim is a web technology advocate pushing for a faster web at Akamai.