Designing for Performance

Preface

If you are making decisions about the look and feel of a website, you are making decisions that directly impact the performance of that site, even if your job title doesn’t include the word designer. Performance is a responsibility that can and should be shared across disciplines, as everyone at an organization impacts it. Whether it’s convincing upper management that performance should be a priority, considering your options when weighing aesthetics and page speed in your day-to-day work, or educating and empowering other designers and developers within your organization, you have a large suite of tools and technology available to help you champion site speed.

Designers are in a unique position to impact overall page load time and perceived performance. The decisions that are made during the design process have an enormous impact on the end result of a site. I believe it’s important for designers to understand the basics of page speed and the choices they have at their disposal to optimize their markup and images. I also believe it’s imperative that designers weigh the balance between aesthetics and performance to improve the end user experience, and that everyone making changes to a site has the ability to measure the business metric impact of those changes.

After giving talks, workshops, and keynotes on frontend performance for years, I realized in talking with audience members that culture change is central to the performance topic. No one likes being a performance “cop” ...