Preface

Breaking Limits

I started with web performance around 10 years ago, and two things remain unchanged in this field: it’s always essential to understand the underlying technologies of the web and mobile networks; and techniques change frequently, so you must keep yourself updated. I authored two books on mobile web programming and performance, and everything moves so fast that I’m always amazed at how much more is possible for us to improve the user experience.

Preparing a session for the Fluent Conference in San Jose, I realized that many web professionals are aware of the most common web performance techniques, but they don’t understand what else they can do to achieve much better scores and increase conversion in a quickly evolving web landscape. So came the idea of creating this report as a way to share an updated list of tips to hack web performance and achieve astonishing scores for your metrics. Some of the hacks don’t require too much effort on your part, whereas others require some architectural changes.

My goal in writing this report is to share these latest tips and best practices to improve initial load, resource loading, and overall experience. If you can learn even just a few new tricks from this report, everybody will win, thanks to making a faster web.

Let’s keep the conversation on Twitter at @firt.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic: Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.
Constant width: Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Note

This element signifies a general note.

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