Tackling Front End Performance —Strategy, Tools, and Techniques
Performance, we all know it matters. Coming from the country with the fastest fixed broadband speed in the world, Singapore, I do take that fast internet speed for granted.
I never did realise how important speed would be till today, as I write this article from the British Library, experiencing the sheer slowness of public wifi.
Strategy
There are usually different strategies when it comes to improving front end performance, and depending on your organisation’s needs and goals, the strategy I share here may be relevant you. I usually adapt a two pronged approach when it comes to performance.
The Two Pronged Approach
The first would be to optimise during development, this means doing as much as you can before you deploy your site. This is, but not limited to, image optimisation, asset minification, deferring scripts etc.
Once that is done, the second bit would be to optimise the site after it has been deployed. This means using tools such as Pagespeedtest, LightHouse, or Pingdom to test your site. You will be able to get a report on how your site is performing, and then tackle the issues that are plaguing your site’s performance.
