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:

• BlazeIO by Akamai
• yslow by Yahoo

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:

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