Chapter 1. The Importance of Frontend Performance

Most of my web career has been spent as a backend engineer. As such, I dutifully approached each performance project as an exercise in backend optimization, concentrating on compiler options, database indexes, memory management, etc. There's a lot of attention and many books devoted to optimizing performance in these areas, so that's where most people spend time looking for improvements. In reality, for most web pages, less than 10–20% of the end user response time is spent getting the HTML document from the web server to the browser. If you want to dramatically reduce the response times of your web pages, you have to focus on the other 80–90% of the end user experience. What is that 80–90% spent on? How can it be reduced? The chapters that follow lay the groundwork for understanding today's web pages and provide 14 rules for making them faster.