Achieve optimal website speed and performance with this Wrox guide Effective website development requires optimum performance with regard to both web browser and server. This book covers all aspects of building and maintaining websites that deliver peak performance on all levels. Exploring both front-end and back-end configuration, it examines factors like compression and JavaScript, database performance, MySQL tuning, NoSQL alternatives, load-balancing across multiple servers, effective caching of web contents, CSS, and much more. Both developers and system administrators will find value in this platform-neutral guide. Covers essential information for creating and maintaining websites that deliver peak performance on both front end and back end Explains how to configure front-end performance related to the web browser and how to speed up communication between server and browser Topics include MySQL tuning, NoSQL alternatives, CSS, JavaScript, and web images Explores how to minimize the performance penalties of SSL; load-balancing across multiple servers with Apache, Nginx, and MySQL; and effective caching and compression of web contents Professional Website Performance: Optimizing the Front End and Back End offers essential information to help both front-end and back-end technicians ensure better website performance.

Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process. Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to: Make Fewer HTTP Requests Use a Content Delivery Network Add an Expires Header Gzip Components Put Stylesheets at the Top Put Scripts at the Bottom Avoid CSS Expressions Make JavaScript and CSS External Reduce DNS Lookups Minify JavaScript Avoid Redirects Remove Duplicates Scripts Configure ETags Make Ajax Cacheable If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable. "If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be adramatically better place. Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's reallyno excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore." -Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM Inspector "Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance." -Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation

A practical book on website performance for web developers, concentrating mainly on front-end performance improvement. It covers plenty of solid theory, but is also packed with useful, real world hints and tips that you can use on your sites today. Topics covered include: User experience, design and performance Measuring and monitoring performance Setting up a page weight budget Network and server improvements Optimizing images and video Optimizing scripts and third party content Lean DOM operations The book also comes with a handy "cheat sheet" summarizing many of the key tips contained within the book.

Performance simply matters. Technology may allow us to "go bigger", but maybe not necessarily be better when it comes to performance. Now is the time to utilize the amazing tools that are available for making websites faster, and to learn how to improve user experience and satisfaction. This is a practical collection of tutorials on front-end website performance for web developers. It's packed with useful, real world hints and tips that you can use on your sites today. It contains: Which Browsers Should Your Website Support? by Craig Buckler Are Your WordPress Themes Flexible or Fast? by Maria Antonietta Perna Five Techniques to Lazy Load Images for Website Performance by Maria Antonietta Perna Optimizing CSS: ID Selectors and Other Myths by Ivan Curic Optimizing CSS: Tweaking Animation Performance with DevTools by Maria Antonietta Perna Lightning Fast Websites with Prefetching by Maria Antonietta Perna Optimizing Web Fonts for Performance: the State of the Art by Maria Antonietta Perna JavaScript Performance Optimization Tips: An Overview by Ivan Curic 7 Performance Tips for Jank-free JavaScript Animations by Maria Antonietta Perna What Is a CDN and How Does It Work? by Bruno Skvorc This book is for all front-end developers that want to build sites and apps that run faster. You'll need to be familiar with HTML and CSS and have a reasonable level of understanding of JavaScript in order to follow the discussion.

Having trouble outrunning the zombie horde? Is your website so slow the remnants of humanity flee before it even loads? In this book we’ll discuss many different ways to make your website faster. These ways fall into three general strategies: reducing what’s sent to the user, speeding up/smoothing the website’s rendering, and reducing processing and download time. Within those three strategies there are a variety of zombie smashing tactics that can each shave a bit off the time it takes to show your website. Some tactics won’t be worth the trade-offs or won’t be feasible within your particular setup, but we’ll discuss each of them, the pros and cons of their use and when implementation doesn’t depend on particular server software or hardware we’ll show you how to do it too (even if it does require details about your particular setup, we’ll give you enough information to help you know where to start.) This book is a great starter on your performance journey showing you plenty of easy to implement, low hanging zombies that you can pick off to quickly make your site faster.

Summary Web Performance in Action is your companion guide to making websites faster. You'll learn techniques that speed the delivery of your site's assets to the user, increase rendering speed, decrease the overall footprint of your site, as well as how to build a workflow that automates common optimization techniques. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Nifty features, hip design, and clever marketing are great, but your website will flop if visitors think it's slow. Network conditions can be unpredictable, and with today's sites being bigger than ever, you need to set yourself apart from the competition by focusing on speed. Achieving a high level of performance is a combination of front-end architecture choices, best practices, and some clever sleight-of-hand. This book will demystify all these topics for you. About the Book Web Performance in Action is your guide to making fast websites. Packed with "Aha!" moments and critical details, this book teaches you how to create performant websites the right way. You'll master optimal rendering techniques, tips for decreasing your site's footprint, and technologies like HTTP/2 that take your website's speed from merely adequate to seriously fast. Along the way, you'll learn how to create an automated workflow to accomplish common optimization tasks and speed up development in the process. What's Inside Foolproof performance-boosting techniques Optimizing images and fonts HTTP/2 and how it affects your optimization workflow About the Reader This book assumes that you're familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Many examples make use of Git and Node.js. About the Author Jeremy Wagner is a professional front-end web developer with over ten years of experience. Foreword by Ethan Marcotte. Table of Contents Understanding web performance Using assessment tools Optimizing CSS Understanding critical CSS Making images responsive Going further with images Faster fonts Keeping JavaScript lean and fast Boosting performance with service workers Fine-tuning asset delivery Looking to the future with HTTP/2 Automating optimization with gulp

Performance is critical to the success of any website, and help with using today’s new tools is key. In this remarkable guide, 32 leading web performance experts offer practical tips, techniques, and advice for optimizing your site’s user experience. Originally written for an online calendar, this collection of articles will inspire you to squeeze every ounce of performance from your site—whether you’re a web developer, mobile developer, or web designer. Check the table of contents and you’ll be convinced. In order of appearance, Web Performance Daybook authors include: Patrick Meenan Nicholas Zakas Guy Podjarny Stoyan Stefanov Tim Kadlec Brian Pane Josh Fraser Steve Souders Betty Tso Israel Nir Marcel Duran Éric Daspet Alois Reitbauer Matthew Prince Buddy Brewer Alexander Podelko Estelle Weyl Aaron Peters Tony Gentilcore Matthew Steele Bryan McQuade Tobie Langel Billy Hoffman Joshua Bixby Sergey Chernyshev JP Castro Pavel Paulau David Calhoun Nicole Sullivan James Pearce Tom Hughes-Croucher Dave Artz