Full Stack Web Performance

Chapter 4. Next Steps

We’ve talked at a high level about what sorts of performance wins you can achieve when taking a holistic, full-stack view of your web applications. So, what are some tactical next steps you can take?

Get Synthetic Web Performance Results

As we talked about in Chapter 1, run your site through a web performance test like WebPageTest. It is free, gives you an idea of your current standing, and gives you steps to take to remediate the issues found.

Here are some other web performance tests:

• YSlow

• Pingdom

• Google’s PageSpeed Insights

Trial a CDN for Free

We talked at length about some of the benefits we can get from using a CDN, but signing up with a CDN can be daunting and will involve cost. An easy first step on that path is to set up a free trial account with a CDN. Most of the popular CDNs have a free trial available:

• Akamai, available at https://www.akamai.com/us/en/campaign/get-akamaized.jsp

• Incapsula, available at https://www.incapsula.com/pricing-and-plans.html

• MaxCDN, available at https://www.maxcdn.com/test-account/

With your free trial set up, benchmark your site behind a CDN and compare the performance numbers to your current setup. If you are really feeling daring, point some traffic to it and see what benefits you can get infrastructurally (are your machines less taxed, can you quantify how many fewer nodes you would need to maintain?). Can you quantify these benefits and use them to justify the budget request to actually make the plunge? ...