July 9, 2014
Google Page Speed, clean front end code @ Toronto Web Performance Meetup
Organized by Barbara Bermes. Hosted at EventMobi. Blake Crosby talked about Google Page Speed.
- The Insights web application is good for testing out lives sites (yours, and those of others)
- The Chrome plugin is good for testing your in-prgoress sites while offline/not publicly accessible, and appears in Chrome’s dev tools
- The Apache and nginx Page Speed modules are great for speeding up existing websites and can be enabled/disabled on a per-vhost basis
- The API could be good for integrating a speech check into a build process
Other similar tools include:
Blake showed that the top 4 sites in Alexa’s rankings (Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube) all had Page Speed Insights rankings above 97%. Just for kicks, here’s a few lower ranking sites:
| Alexa Rank | URL | Insights score |
|---|---|---|
| 19 | Sohu.com | 70% |
| 21 | Yandex.ru | 75% |
| 22 | vk.com | 85% |
| 23 | bing.com | 89% |
| 24 | wordpress.com | 86% |
He also talked about how SPDY and HTTP2 protocols are different and better than HTTP. Slides are here
Shalom talked about keeping a front-end codebase neat and tidy
- Try custom icon fonts (see Font Awesome)
- Try Object Oriented CSS
- Did you know that browers still animated gif when they are off-screen? It’s safest to take your spinny activity indicator gifs out of the DOM when they aren’t needed