Integrating Web Performance Best Practices
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
The business side of web performance
Web systems and applications are an integral part of any company, and the speed of these applications plays an important role in user experience, which can significantly affect business outcomes. Join expert Sergey Chernyshev to learn how to ensure web performance is a top priority in your organization.
Over two three-hour days, you'll gain valuable hands-on experience in measuring the speed of your application and interpreting these measurements, improving performance and avoiding common pitfalls, and transforming performance from an afterthought to a core component of your creation process. You'll also learn how to better explain web performance to business partners, helping them understand the impact it has on overall experience.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
By the end of this live, online course, you’ll understand:
- How to measure the speed of an application and interpret and act upon these measurements
- The difference between synthetic testing and real user measurement, the difference between and technical and user-centric performance metrics, and when to use each
- How to transform performance from an afterthought to a core component of your creation process
And you’ll be able to:
- Explain why web performance is important for your organization and rally your organization around the need for solid, speedy web apps
- Pick the right metrics for monitoring and optimization
- Select tools for web performance analysis and optimization
- Quickly find solutions to common performance problems
- Use progress storyboarding for communication among product, design, and development teams
This live event is for you because...
- You're a developer with experience building frontend web applications who needs to address user experience concerns around speed.
- You're a business or product manager with experience creating consumer-facing web applications who wants to ensure you don’t lose revenue and customer engagement due to slow applications.
- You're a UX designer with a background in building rich web experiences who wants to add speed to your toolbox.
Prerequisites
- A basic understanding of how the parts of a web application (web servers, frontend code, browser, etc.) interact
- Familiarity with web development and frontend technologies (i.e., HTML, JavaScript, and CSS)
Required materials and setup:
A machine with Google Chrome and the WebPagetest launcher extension installed
Complete the survey and submit your site) (must be publicly accessible) for analysis during the course exercises (optional)
Recommended preparation:
WPO Stats (website)
Introduction to Web Performance (video)
High Performance Web Sites (book)
Even Faster Web Sites (book)
Time Is Money (book)
Using WebPageTest (book)
Designing for Performance (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Day 1
Why performance? (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Speed and business KPIs; stakeholders
- Hands-on exercise: Identify key pages on your site, business KPIs, and stakeholders
Break (10 minutes)
Tools of the trade (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Measurement and analysis; optimization tools
- Hands-on exercise: Create a tools inventory in different parts of the product lifecycle and identify gaps
Break (10 minutes)
Monitoring performance metrics (50 minutes)
- Lecture: History and overview of current metrics; measuring user experience
- Hands-on exercise: Identify core UI components of the key pages on your site and assign them to page load stages
Wrap-up and Q&A(10 minutes)
Day 2
Practical performance analysis (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Using WebPagetest and Chrome DevTools; understanding RUM (real user monitoring) data
- Hands-on exercise: Run WebPagetest on your site to measure key performance metrics and identify performance problems
Break (10 minutes)
Improvements and prioritization (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Common problems and anti-patterns; work prioritization
- Hands-on exercise: Detect anti-patterns and identify user experience problems and solutions
Break (10 minutes)
Designing speed: Process changes (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Progress storyboarding and new design deliverables; aligning technology with business goals
- Hands-on exercise: Create a progress storyboard for key pages of your site and identify techniques that can be used for each page load stage
Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)
Your Instructor
Sergey Chernyshev
Sergey Chernyshev (@sergeyche) is web performance enthusiast, open source hacker and web addict. He has 20 years of web development and operations experience and organizes New York Web Performance Meetup Group, local community of web performance geeks in New York and helps kick-start local groups about Web Performance around the world. Sergey often speaks on performance-related topics at various local New York events and global conferences, including O'Reilly Velocity and QCon.