In today’s fast-paced world, nobody wants to waste their time waiting for a Web page to load. Having a slow site can decrease the number of pages a visitor views, the amount of time they spend on the site, and their likelihood to return to the site. However, what is surprising is that even small delays (like 200 milliseconds) can have a meaningful impact on user behavior. It is for this reason that many large companies are shifting more of their time and resources into making their sites faster.
We were very lucky to have Google’s Head Performance Engineer, Steve Souders, come to Zillow yesterday to talk about the importance of performance and how to make mobile websites faster. His technical talk detailed some best practices for speeding up websites and he introduced some of the latest performance tools.
Steve is a true performance expert. He works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives, and previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, and the creator of many performance tools and services including YSlow (one of the top 25 Firefox add-ons), the HTTP Archive, Cuzillion, Jdrop, ControlJS, and Browserscope. He also serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly.
> See Steve Souders’ talk on Zillow’s YouTube channel.