Full Stack JavaScript Strategies

Chapter 20. Frontend Performance

Now you have your frontend in a good place, and you’ve probably done at least a beta release of this product to customers. Going forward, you’ll be adding more features, doing maintenance, and looking for ways to improve the app for both the developer and the user experiences. One way to do both is by improving performance. The faster and more smoothly the app runs, the more the UX improves, and the more streamlined the process becomes for devs to make updates as they develop locally.

It’s frustrating to encounter apps that load slowly, have a jumpy interface as data becomes available, and are difficult for your dev team to update. Once your app is stable and you have all of the main architecture in place, you can start focusing on these concerns. This is your chance to really optimize the code based on patterns you’ve seen from logs and feedback from the dev team and other stakeholders.

In this chapter, I’ll go over:

• Common causes of performance issues

• How to measure and improve your performance metrics

• Tools to improve your app’s performance

• How to keep the code clean for better performance

Performance is a topic that tends to come up once an app has been in production for a while. One of the devs on the team will bring up how slow development is because the pages take forever to load code changes. This is something that should be in your mind from the beginning because it directly affects how the app is maintained and developed over ...