Performance is critical for successful websites. In the past, the focus was on backend performance to make sure sites stayed up. Today the focus is on speed. Studies from Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and other leading websites show that a faster site results in a better user experience, more traffic, increased revenue, and lower operating costs. Steve Souders, Head Performance Engineer at Google, describes the best practices for building high performance websites. It turns out that 80%+ of the time the user is waiting is spent in the frontend, not the backend. These performance best practices include reducing the number and size of HTTP requests, loading JavaScript asynchronously, and making pages render more quickly. Attendees of this workshop will leave with a list of actionable takeaways that have a track record of making websites twice as fast.

About the speaker:

Steve is the Head Performance Engineer at Google where he works on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Prior to that Steve worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos, and co-founded Helix Systems and CoolSync. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He is the creator of YSlow, one of the top 25 Firefox add-ons. He’s created numerous performance tools and services including the HTTP Archive, Cuzillion, Jdrop, ControlJS, and Browserscope. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford.