Web Page Size, Speed, and Performance

Consumers prefer fast, no-nonsense web experiences, yet reports show that the top 2,000 retail websites have grown increasingly bigger and slower over the past three years. In this O'Reilly report, content strategist Terrence Dorsey examines why web pages have become so fat, and offers guidelines to help your company reverse the trend.

Bigger screen real estate, high-density displays, ads, and automatically playing video add to the bloat, but tools and techniques that enable web developers to build complex sites quickly and easily are also part of the problem. Dorsey shows you how to measure site speed, assess page components, and optimize code to help reduce abandonment rates and make your site successful.

Measure your site's request latency and load time on various devices; Learn how long it takes before a user is able to interact with a page; Focus optimization on the your site's most revenue-related aspects; Reduce the number of components it takes to render your page; Slim down your HTML, and combine and minify your CSS files; Determine whether (and which) scripts are blocking page rendering or interaction; Optimize images for size and quality - and learn to use them judiciously; Focus on the mobile experience first, then bring optimizations to the desktop.