Responsive & Fast

Book excerpt: Is Responsive Web Design (RWD) slowing your site down? It doesn’t have to. With this concise book, you’ll learn practical techniques for improving performance with RWD, including a default set of guidelines you can use as an easy starting point. Web performance researcher and evangelist Guy Podjarny walks you through several existing solutions for dealing with RWD performance problems, and offers advice for choosing optimizations that will be most useful for your needs. RWD performance problems stem from excessive downloads of resources, including images, JavaScript and CSS, and HTML—downloads designed to let your web application adapt to different screen sizes. Podjarny presents a series of increasingly larger-scope solutions to each issue, including client-side techniques and RESS (Responsive + Server Side Components). Address performance issues by starting with Podjarny’s default guidelines Use a JavaScript image loader and an image transcoding service to create Responsive Images Reduce JavaScript and CSS downloads with asynchronous scripts, conditional loading, and multi-viewport CSS Prioritize resources to avoid excess content in RWD and defer the load of any content that’s not critical Explore server-side Adaptive Delivery and RESS solutions as an alternative to “pure” RWD Guy Podjarny, or Guypo for short, is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Akamai’s Web Experience business unit.