Preface

Well before I ever entertained the notion of writing a book, the idea that websites ought to be fast was a high priority in all my projects. In my humble opinion, slow websites are not a mere inconvenience. They are a critical sort of user experience problem. Until a website loads, no user experience exists. The longer it takes for a site to load, the more this absence is felt by the user.

When I proposed this book to Manning in 2015, I was hardly the first to write on the topic of web performance. Many authors before me had written in this space, and I knew that I would be standing on the shoulders of giants. My goal with Web Performance in Action was to provide a modern guide for today’s web developers that would give them the knowledge they need to make their websites faster than ever. I think this book meets that goal.

When web performance is discussed, it’s often tied to financial concepts. The idea that a poorly performing website can affect sales or ad revenues is hardly new. What we don’t hear enough about, however, is how such a website can be potentially costly for the user on a restricted data plan. Or how slow websites are an impassible sort of barrier for people mired in an antiquated internet infrastructure. So much of the world has such a difficult time accessing the web. While infrastructure is slowly improving, we as developers can move the needle for users by developing sites with performance in mind.