PerfMatters Conference

Summary by Nikhil John

In a Nutshell

• Measure - Optimize - Monitor
• Don't build for just the happy path
• Performance is $$$
• Build a Performance Culture

Performance as a feature, not an afterthought

• Proactive Performance Enhancement
• Reactive Performance Enhancement

Getting Executive Buy-in

• Link your OKRs to Performance with data
• Know the link between Performance and Revenue 

• Pinterest increased search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15% when they reduced perceived wait times by 40%.

• COOK increased conversions by 7%, decreased bounce rates by 7%, and increased pages per session by 10% when they reduced average page load time by 850 milliseconds.

• The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.

• DoubleClick by Google found 53% of mobile site visits were abandoned if a page took longer than 3 seconds to load.

Performance is not just Page Load Speed

• It is also Accessibility, Device and Browser Support
• Mobile Devices in general have slower networks, less processing power

Mobile first is not just UX

• Don't just design and develop Mobile First, also test Mobile First.
• If your app is performance on Mobile, it will perform on Desktop

Privilege and Performance

• Not everyone has the best phones and the fastest internet
• Build for the worst-off, progressively enhance for the privileged

Aim for PWA standards

PRPL is a pattern for structuring and serving Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), with an emphasis on the performance of app delivery and launch. It stands for:

• Push critical resources for the initial URL route.

• Render initial route.

• Pre-cache remaining routes.

• Lazy-load and create remaining routes on demand.

Minimize 3rd Party Impact

• Remember JS scripts are blocking when used without async/defer
• Minimize your third party JS count
• Centralize your third party use with something like SegmentIO 

Measure - Optimize - Monitor - Measure

• Don't prematurely optimize
• Know your apdex
• Use New Relic/Pingdom other monitoring tools
• Set your perf targets 
• Optimize
• Measure
• Repeat

Fin