One Second or Bust: The Quest for Quick Page Loads
Session scheduled at 9:30-10:20 in Room 1 (Johnson)
Speed matters. You can greet your guests with a gorgeous site, but if it loads painfully slow, many of them will never see it. People can have slow internet connections anywhere, but mobile connections face particular challenges. If your site takes more than a second to load, you’ll see traffic swiftly drop away. So how do we beat the one second barrier? We’ll begin our quest by dissecting the anatomy of a request for a web page. When you go to a URL, how exactly does a browser look through your HTML to determine how to display a page? We’ll see how front end assets like CSS and JS files as well as fonts and images offer some of the biggest opportunity for improving page load speeds. We will also briefly cover back-end caching tools key to a quick page load. Media heavy sites may not entirely load in one second, but there are still ways to make a site feel like it’s loading quickly. By the end of the session, you’ll be ready to speed out the door to make your site as fast as it can be.
Presented By
Marc Drummond
As a front-end developer for Lullabot, Marc focuses on creating great experiences no matter the device, browser or abilities of the person accessing a site. Marc is currently writing Drupal 8 Responsive Web Design for Packt Publishing and serves as co-maintainer of Drupal 8’s core Responsive Image and Breakpoint modules. He previously served as the web technologies coordinator for the city of Minnetonka from 2004-2014; he also served on the board of the National Association of Government Web Professionals from 2009-2014, serving as President of the organization from 2013-2014.
Marc earned a BA in English and a concentration in Public Service from Albion College in Michigan, as well as degrees in web design and graphic design at Minneapolis Community & Technical College. Marc enjoys living near the Twin Cities suburbs with his wife and two-year-old daughter, as well as their cat and dog.
Follow @MarcDrummond on Twitter