Introduction

Web performance has always been an important aspect of creating a website—numerous studies have shown the negative impact of a poorly performing website. With every additional second your website takes to load or respond to interactions, visitors leave, sales are lost, and engagement goes down.

Many of us have high speed internet access with an ever increasing download speed, but the demands we are putting on that connection are ever increasing too. Websites are now complex applications filled with bandwidth-stretching media and constant talking back and forth to various servers in the backend. Additionally, use of the internet is increasingly moving to mobile, adding to constraints on the network and other resources.

Luckily, technology does not stand still. A raft of new tools have emerged that website developers can add to their arsenal to help fight the web performance battle. This sampler contains chapters from four excellent Manning books about some of these new technologies including HTTP/2, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and Web Assembly (WASM). These technologies have been introduced in the last few years and now enjoy broad support in most web browsers, making them viable options for web developers.

I hope these chapters help explain the basics of these recent changes in the web performance space and perhaps whet your appetite to investigate these technologies further. If that is the case, then I highly recommended the books these chapters have been taken from.

—Barry Pollard