Page speed is a critical part of modern web application performance. From the speed of generating a response on the server, to how it ultimately gets rendered in the user's device, there are a number of areas we need to stay on top of. However, many devs are more comfortable with the backend side of things - happier working with APIs and CLIs than fighting CSS oddities, JS race conditions or images jumping around as a page loads. And that's before we even get to the fun of node js and npm versioning issues! As a result, many backend devs tend to shy away from performance issues caused on the frontend of the application.
Fortunately there are a number of "quick wins" available to backend devs to significantly boost frontend speed! In this talk, I cover a number of techniques to improve things like:
- Image loading
- Font rendering
- Video players
- Display ad performance
All of these can be improved by backend devs without getting bogged down in frontend tooling or frameworks, and make a rapid improvement to page speed scores. We'll also cover the metrics we can use to objectively measure the impact of our changes.
About this talk
This talk was delivered at PHPUK 2024, and received a very positive reception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuWGil_7kY