Web Performance — Serving the web at light-speed

Everyone loves speed, right?

TL;DR… Jump to the content now!

In this 3 articles serie, I’ll show how to use a few tools and techniques to optimize your website for load speed.

We will only focus on universal web performance techniques, that you can use whatever language/framework you’re using, as long as it serves HTTP, and on techniques that wont need any (or only very tiny) adjustments to your code base.

Here is our target architecture:

our target architecture

Cool! Let’s get started…

• Part 1 — Nginx, pagespeed and a simple node.js backend
• Part 2 — Amazon Cloudfront as our Content Delivery Network
• Part 3 — Instrument, Measure and Learn

Need more? Here are the tools we’ll use…

• nginx to serve HTTP(s) content; already using it? you can just tune your current instance’s configuration;
• ngx_pagespeed to optimize the html, scripts, css and images; lots of possible options, we’ll use reasonable defaults, it’s up to you to chose the best deal by reading the (fucking) docs.
• amazon cloudfront as a geo-cdn, a content delivery network that will take into account your visitors geolocation to serve assets from an edge location closer from him than your backend servers; it is also used to serve assets from a separate, cookie-less, domain, an usefull feature to circumvent the simultaneous-download-per-host browser limits; of course, this only apply if you’re using HTTP or regular HTTPS, and is nulled if you’re using SPDY or HTTP2;
• docker (optional) to run the various services in isolated linux containers.

Now go ahead and read how to set this up…

• Part 1 — Nginx, pagespeed and a simple node.js backend
• Part 2 — Amazon Cloudfront as our Content Delivery Network
• Part 3 — Instrument, Measure and Learn

Woot! Wasn’t that fast?

and don’t forget to share the love!