Website Performance Analysis

In this workshop, Steve Souders explains the rules he developed as part of YSlow, as well as new best practices he’s developed while at Google. With those in mind, he analyzes several of today’s popular websites to see how well they follow, or don’t follow, this advice. As part of this analysis attendees will learn how to use tools like Firebug, YSlow, HttpWatch, Hammerhead, Cuzillion, and Smush.it.

What will I learn?

• How to make your websites 25% faster (or more!) by learning how to implement performance best practices with HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, and browsers
• Techniques to optimize websites to attract and retain users, stay ahead of competitors, and offer a better user experience to get more page views and conversions
• The most effective ways to measure performance, the best performance tools to use, and how to integrate performance into the development process

Is this class for me?

If you’re a web developer with working knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, this is an ideal class—especially if you want to improve the performance of your web sites.

Instructor

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives, and previously served as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. He also co-founded Helix Systems and CoolSync, and worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. Souders is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug, which has over 700,000 downloads. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He recently taught High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University.

What should I bring with me?

A laptop computer, and a copy of High Performance Web Sites, O’Reilly Media, Inc.