Introduction to Front End Performance Optimization
Treehouse
Course Summary
People want to use websites that load quickly, and every second counts. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you can lose 40% of your audience. Every additional second in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. In these lessons, we're going to take a slow website and make it load faster using front end performance optimization. By the end, you'll know many practical techniques that can speed up any website.
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Course Description
About this Course People want to use websites that load quickly, and every second counts. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you can lose 40% of your audience. Every additional second in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. In these lessons, we're going to take a slow website and make it load faster using front end performance optimization. By the end, you'll know many practical techniques that can speed up any website. What you'll learn
- Performance measurement
- Reduce HTTP requests
- CSS and JavaScript minification
About the Teacher
Nick is a teacher at Treehouse and an independent game developer. His Twitter handle is @nickrp.
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Course Syllabus
Planning for Performance
Websites can load slowly for a number of reasons, but often, performance problems due to poorly optimized HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In these lessons we'll define front end performance optimization and learn how to set a performance budget. 4 steps- What is Front End Performance Optimization? 1:53
- What is Front End Performance Optimization? 3 questions
- Setting a Performance Budget 3:05
- Setting a Performance Budget 3 questions
- Extra Credit If you're currently building a website, try creating a performance budget. Then, measure the performance of your site to see if it's within the appropriate bounds. If not, try using some of the optimization techniques covered in these lessons to bring it closer to your performance budget.
Measuring Performance
One of the most important aspects of performance is measurement. By using software tools to measure the speed of a website, you can determine if your optimizations are actually helping, or hurting, front end performance. Measurement will also help you determine if you're meeting the goals outlined in your performance budget. 4 stepsOptimize Assets
Images, CSS, JavaScripts, and other assets all add up, both in file size and in the total number of HTTP requests. By combining assets together, removing assets that are not being used, and using a few other techniques, we can improve page load times. 6 stepsCombine and Minify Assets
One way to reduce HTTP requests is to combine assets together. This can be done with SVGs as well as other types of images. CSS and JavaScript files can often be combined together as well. In addition, CSS and JavaScript can go through a process called minification, where comments, whitespace, and other unnecessary characters are stripped out. 6 steps
