Boosting Frontend Speed: Quick Wins for Backend Developers

Page speed is a critical part of modern web application performance. From the speed of generating a response on the server, to how it ultimately gets rendered in the user's device, there are a number of areas we need to stay on top of. However, many devs are more comfortable with the backend side of things - happier working with APIs and CLIs than fighting CSS oddities, JS race conditions or images jumping around as a page loads. And that's before we even get to the fun of node js and npm versioning issues! As a result, many backend devs tend to shy away from performance issues caused on the frontend of the application.

Fortunately there are a number of "quick wins" available to backend devs to significantly boost frontend speed! In this talk, I cover a number of techniques to improve things like:

Image loading
Font rendering
Video players
Display ad performance

All of these can be improved by backend devs without getting bogged down in frontend tooling or frameworks, and make a rapid improvement to page speed scores. We'll also cover the metrics we can use to objectively measure the impact of our changes.