A top-to-bottom performance overhaul

Modern websites are layers upon layers of technologies, all interacting and building upon one another. Whilst technologies like BigPipe and Varnish can do wonderful things to help improve the experience of a site, if a site is poorly built, they can only do so much. Caching a rubbish site still delivers rubbish.

This talk aims to bring you through the areas we look at when giving a site a performance overhaul. We will look at the server, Drupal itself and contrib, custom code, the theme layer and front end optimisations. We'll take each one at a time and offer strategies and tactics for making, measuring and proving your improvements at every layer. We'll even touch upon how decisions made at the very start of a project have performance impact and why performance needs to be championed at every stage.

This talk is for those interested in performance, but maybe don't know where to begin, or for those who think that performance is all about fancy server-side hardware and we developers don't need to think about it. It's for front-end devs who want their sites faster and for designers and architects who have realised that they need to know more in order to deliver for their clients.

About the speaker:

I'm the lead support engineer at Annertech since 2014, and joined the company in 2011. In my role I've inherited all sorts of sites and usually had to make them faster. I've been attending Drupalcons since 2009, doing Drupal since 2008, building websites since 1998 and mucking around in Basic on a Dragon32 since 1987. I've spoken at Drupalcamps in Ireland and before Drupal I toured around Ireland delivering technology training and around Europe playing heavy metal.