This practical, short book provides advice, tips, and best practice for improving website performance, ranging from quick, five-minute configuration changes to major website overhauls, concentrating on front-end activities and server configurations to optimize the code delivered to a browser.

Jump Start Web Performance

Preface

Web Performance Matters

Admitting your site has a performance problem is the first step on the road to recovery! This chapter provides a list of testing tools to help you understand issues using real data, showing how:

Testing Tools

This chapter lists a selection of tasty yet simple, practical, and cost-effective performance solutions that can be implemented on any site within a few minutes. It’s best to read the following sections in order, since they start with simpler hosting and server settings before moving on to quick image, CSS, and JavaScript improvements.

Quick Snacks

The tips provided in this chapter will require a little more effort, but the performance results on new and existing sites may be more dramatic. Some of the simplest but most effective database optimizations are tackled first before delving into images, media, fonts, CSS animations, and some controversial topics.

Simple Recipes

The performance techniques described in this chapter are more radical and could be difficult to apply to an existing project. Fortunately, there are no such limitations when embarking on a new site or app, so we look deeper into CMS issues, JavaScript optimization, DOM handling, server-side rendering, static site generators (SSGs), and development processes.

Life-Changing Diets

I hope you’re feeling full after your extensive buffet of performance delicacies. Not all dishes will have been to your taste, but you should have found a few recipes to try.

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