Frontend Optimization Handbook

Chapter 2. Tooling

“Measure twice, cut once.”

Carpenter’s adage

This chapter considers tool selection. Tools help you understand the current performance of your digital applications—both in ideal conditions and to end users. Such understanding is required on two bases: absolute, and relative to key competitors and other mass market so-called “bellwether” sites such as Facebook, BBC, and CNN—wherever your customers are when they are not on your site.

Tools also let you see how the individual components that make up the overall customer experience of your site are performing—images, multimedia, logic (JavaScript), third-party affiliates, etc. Finally, tools capture the detailed measurements needed to inform core analytics on frontend performance, leading to identification of root-cause issues and ultimately to improved performance.

I will not compare specific vendor offerings, but rather will explain the various generic approaches and their strengths and weaknesses. Success in this field cannot be achieved by a one-size-fits-all approach, no matter what some would have us believe!

Introduction to FEO Tools

I will provide a summary of available tool types (see “Relevant Tool Categories for FEO”) and then a structured FEO process (see Chapter 3). Before doing so, let’s start with some high-level considerations. This book assumes an operations-centric rather than developer-centric approach. Certainly, the most robust approach to ensuring client-side performance efficiency is to ...