Responsive & Fast: Implementing High-Performance Responsive Design

by Guy Podjarny

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491911617
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/15/2014
Pages:	56
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Guy Podjarny (Guypo) is a web performance researcher/evangelist and Akamai's Web CTO, focusing primarily on Mobile and Front-End performance.



As a researcher, Guy frequently runs large scale tests, exploring performance in the real world and matching it to how browsers behave, and was one of the first to highlight the performance implications of Responsive Web Design.



Guy is also the author of Mobitest, a free mobile measurement tool, and contributes to various open source tools. Guy was previously the co-founder and CTO of blaze.io, acquired by Akamai in 2012.