December 2014
Beginner to intermediate
179 pages
4h 11m
English
Content preview from Designing for Performance
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 6. Measuring and Iterating on Performance
Benchmarks are not just critical to understanding the state of your user experience today, but they will also help you pinpoint what contributes to performance changes over time. Routine checks on various page speed metrics like total page load time, total page weight, and Speed Index for perceived performance for your major pages will enable you to see if things get slower on your site (and hopefully, why). Table 6-1 outlines the major tools you can use for benchmarking your site’s performance, many of which we’ll cover in this chapter.
Table 6-1. Benchmarking overview
Tool | Type | Benchmark | Timing |
YSlow | Browser plug-in | Overall grade, recommendations | As you develop, then once every quarter |
Chrome DevTools | Browser plug-in | Recommendations, waterfall chart, frames per second | As you develop, then once every quarter |
WebPagetest | Sythentic testing | Overall grade, recommendations, waterfall chart, Speed Index | Every time you make a large change or experiment |
Catchpoint, Gomez, wpt-script, etc. | Sythentic testing (trending) | Trends in your site’s performance over time | Monthly |
Google Analytics, mPulse, Glimpse, etc. | Real user monitoring | Median load time for various audience demographics | Weekly |
As sites age and change, there are plenty of opportunities for both improvements and degradations in performance; it’s imperative to keep an eye on these metrics using browser plug-ins, synthetic tests, and real user monitoring.
Browser Tools
To begin to see how well your site performs ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.