Web Performance

Web performance is my favourite topic and these articles should give you a flavour of the different tools & tricks that I've been experimenting with. If you'd like to learn more about web performance, please check out the articles below.

CSS

Loading CSS Asynchronously

When it comes to web page performance, the size and weight of every resource on the page is important. Large JavaScript and CSS files can slow down your page load times and frustrate your users. There are a number of techniques for loading JavaScript asynchronously and many different techniques for

Web Performance

The Ultimate Image Optimization Cheat Sheet

Images play a massive role in modern web development today. They comprise of around 62% of the average page’s total payload, which is an astonishing amount! In terms of web page performance, images can be a huge performance roadblock, but they don't have to be. Simple image optimization techniques

Web Performance

Automatically removing unused CSS using Grunt

I have previously blogged about the importance of keeping your web pages lean and the impact that unused CSS can have on your page performance. Apart from causing cluttered files, unused CSS can can slow down page load times due to the unnecessary weight of the file. Google Chrome developer

Web Performance

Remove unused CSS in your Web Application

I've previously blogged about my CSS skills and to be honest - they suck! I normally resort to using pre-rolled frameworks such as Twitter's Bootstrap, Foundation or TopCoat. These frameworks are really useful and their components help you get the basics of your UI up and running in no time.

Speaking

Velocity Conference Europe 2013 is a wrap!

Another year, another great conference. This year's Velocity Conference in Europe was packed with loads of great talks and tutorials. Velocity Conference is three great days of concentrated focus on the key aspects of web performance, operations, and mobile performance. If you are interested in web performance or developer operations,

Web Performance

I'll be speaking at Velocity Europe 2013

Velocity Conference is my favourite conference of the year. There is always a host of great speakers and it's packed with awesome web performance topics. If you aren't familiar with Velocity Conference, it is three great days of concentrated focus on the key aspects of web performance, operations, and mobile

Book

Fast ASP.NET Websites Competition - Results

The results are in! Thank you to all the people who entered the competition and tweeted about the book. The competition closed on the night of the 22th October 2013, and the number of entries was fantastic. I can reveal that the following people were chosen at random using random.

Web Performance

A Simple HTML Minifier for ASP.NET

I have previously blogged about the importance of serving your users web pages with speedy load times. Poor web performance equals lost revenue and customers. As you continue to build and improve on the web performance of your site, you will need to look for ingenious ways to squeeze those

Web Performance

Web Page Performance - Profiling paint times

I recently attended the Facebook Mobile Developers Conference in London. Throughout the day, there were a load of great talks, but the one that really stuck out for me was a performance talk entitled "Making m.facebook.com fast". It was all about how Facebook constantly strive to improve the

Web Performance

WebP - Advanced image optimization using ASP.NET MVC

Most modern web pages contain a lot of images. These images often make up the bulk of a web page request. According to the HTTPArchive, images make up over 50% of the average web page and if you are looking to optimize on the performance of your web page, the

Web Performance

Frontend Single Point of Failure

At this year's Velocity Europe conference, I watched a great talk by Google's Patrick Meenan about 3rd party scripts and frontend Single Point of Failure (SPOF). A single point of failure is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. Quite often,

Web Performance

I'm writing a book! Fast ASP.NET Websites

Ever since I first started writing code, I've always been interested in the performance of websites and making them faster. It's amazing how a slow website can be brought to life with a few simple tweaks to your website setup. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone use a

Web Performance

Improve Page Load Times With DNS Prefetching

I'm often looking for ways to improve the performance of my websites and provide a better experience for users. Quite often you may find that your site is running efficiently and performing well. You may also have run your application through Google PageSpeed or Yahoo! YSlow and come out with

Web Performance

Velocity Conference Europe 2012 - Roundup

This week saw the return of Velocity Conference Europe to our shores. With a great line up of speakers, this conference is a gathering of hundreds of web ops and performance professionals that get together to share their ideas and expertise. Without a doubt, this is one of my favourite

Web Performance

Net Magazine Article

An article that I recently wrote for Net Magazine is coming out in the September 2012 issue. The article talks about Content Delivery Networks and the benefits that using one can bring to the speed of your page load times. I am a big fan of the magazine, and it's

Web Performance

Lazy Loading Social Sharing Buttons

Social sharing buttons play a big part on the web today. They are used to drive traffic to the site, and if done correctly can be very successful. Unfortunately, the loading of these buttons has its downsides on performance. Having many social sharing buttons on your site can slow it

Web Performance

HTML5 Asynchronous JavaScript

HTML5 has a handy little attribute called 'async'. This attribute can be used together with Script tags to asynchronously load JavaScript. No more fancy code to get your JavaScript to run asynchronously - you just need to add this to a script tag and it just works. 💡

Web Performance

Memcached for C# - A Walkthrough

A while ago I wrote about Object caching in .NET 4. I think that the Object Caching in .NET 4 is a great tool to use for caching and literally takes minutes to get up and running. However, one of the downsides of using the System.Runtime.Caching in .NET

HTML5

MVC and the HTML5 Application Cache

HTML5 has loads of awesome features and recently I have been playing around with a feature called the Application Cache. The Application Cache is designed to allow you to run your web application offline - that is, without a network connection. A web browser that implements HTML5 offline applications will

Testing

Measuring Web Page Performance with Selenium 2 and the Web Timings API

I have always been interested in measuring web performance, and especially in measuring the improvements in performance. A while ago I attended a Selenium Meetup in London and heard an interesting presentation by one of the QA guys working at Mozilla. He talked about measuring the performance of a web

Web Performance

SmushMySite - Image Optimization Tool Update

The SmushMySite tool has just been updated with a load of new enhancements. For those of you that aren't familiar with the SmushMySite tool, it is a free image optimization tool that takes advantage of the Yahoo Smush.it™ service. It is a quick and easy way to optimize all

Web Performance

SmushMySite Image Optimization Tool - Smush.it™

When I am developing a web site, I am always looking for ways to improve the speed and page load times. I have used a few tools such as Yahoo's YSlow and Google's Page Speed Analyzer. If you have played around extensively with YSlow you may have noticed that there

ASP.NET

Object Caching - .NET 4

As a developer, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to develop faster and more robust applications. One of the ways we can achieve this is by using caching. Caching is the process of storing frequently used data on the server to fulfil subsequent requests. Now there

Web Development

MVC and the Google Visualization API (DataTable)

Google have created an awesome visualization API. It enables you to add live charts, graphs and tables to your web pages. It is quite flexible and has some great features that are quite easy to use once you get started. I started playing around with this API and decided to

Web Performance

Lazy loading images with jQuery

Some of the articles written on this site are pretty image intensive and take up a lot of resources when loading up. An awesome way to improve page load times as well as providing a better user experience is to use lazy loading for your site. There is a excellent