Real Talk on Front-End Performance: Only You Can Prevent Slow Websites

The first wave of Drupal website performance optimization largely focused on the back-end — tuning PHP, using Varnish, Redis, Solr, etc — and the best practices are well established by now. With many of those problems more or less "solved", and with a majority of traffic now coming via mobile devices, front-end performance is increasingly the key to delivering a great user-experience.

Achieving blazing front-end speed requires a savvy developer who knows the terrain, both on the browser/device side, and from the Drupal perspective. You can't just say, "oh we'll put HTTP 2.0 on it and everything will be fine," or "yadd yadd yadd BigPipe will take care of it." You have to understand what is going on, and how to apply that knowledge to optimize.

This session will look at the important tools and techniques that all website developers should know and use when constructing and optimizing. Topics include:

• Asynchonicity for fun and profit
• Speeding first-byte to first paint
• Progressive enhancement
• Meaningful front-end performance testing

Remember, only you can prevent slow websites!