Preface

Well before I ever entertained the notion of writing a book, the idea that websites ought to be fast was a high priority in all my projects. In my humble opinion, slow websites are not a mere inconvenience. They are a critical sort of user experience problem. Until a website loads, no user experience exists. The longer it takes for a site to load, the more this absence is felt by the user.

When I proposed this book to Manning in 2015, I was hardly the first to write on the topic of web performance. Many authors before me had written in this space, and I knew that I would be standing on the shoulders of giants. My goal with Web Performance in Action was to provide a modern guide for today’s web developers that would give them the knowledge they need to make their websites faster than ever. I think this book meets that goal.

When web performance is discussed, it’s often tied to financial concepts. The idea that a poorly performing website can affect sales or ad revenues is hardly new. What we don’t hear enough about, however, is how such a website can be potentially costly for the user on a restricted data plan. Or how slow websites are an impassible sort of barrier for people mired in an antiquated internet infrastructure. So much of the world has such a difficult time accessing the web. While infrastructure is slowly improving, we as developers can move the needle for users by developing sites with performance in mind.

I wrote Web Performance in Action to help you meet your goals, and the folks at Manning participated in refining it. In an age where the web is becoming increasingly complex, the time has never been more appropriate to tackle this problem. I think this book will help you get to where you want to be.