A Pocket Guide to Web Performance

As Five Simple Steps has closed, I'm making the first edition available for free

You can also find many of the other Five Simple Steps authors and their books via Future Simple Steps

Learn why performance matters, and pick up practical techniques to make smoother pages that load faster.

Get it for free!

Web pages are getting larger and slower to load, and we seem to be relying on browser and network improvements to rescue us. Visitors have expectations that pages should be faster but by stretching their patience, there's a danger they will spend less time on our sites, visit fewer pages and buy less.

Aimed at web designers and developers who want to learn why and how to make sites faster, this book will guide you through why performance matters, how to improve it, why the methods work, and some of the trade-offs involved.

You'll learn practical techniques to improve website performance and be introduced to approaches that you can experiment with too.

Using WebPageTest

Learn basic and advanced uses of WebPageTest, the performance measurement tool for optimizing websites. This practical guide shows users new to this tool how run tests and interpret results, and helps experienced users gain a better and more thorough understanding of hidden features in WebPageTest that make testing easier.

Buy from O'Reilly

Written in collaboration with Rick Viscomi (@rick_viscomi) and Marcel Duran (@marcelduran) Using WebPageTest is available in print and as an ebook too.