Let's Be Upfront About Performance

The speed with which your website loads for your visitors is very important. Studies show that a small slow-down in responsiveness can cause a large drop in user satisfaction and engagement. That means lost eyeballs, and potentially lost sales.

There are many tutorials on the web about making your Drupal site faster to respond from a back-end perspective by adding caching, tuning your server parameters and the like, but less is said about the latency that comes from a site's front-end, in spite of the fact that front-end latency accounts for more than 95% of the latency on 8 of the 10 biggest sites on the web.

In this talk, I'll mention the current issues we face with regard to front-end performance, introduce various ways to measure and solve front-end problems and show how some of them can be brought to bear on the Drupal sites that you build.

The talk includes many demos of tools for analyzing front-end performance and includes some inline code examples around how to configure your LAMP stack and how to use external tools like Compass to make your site's front end faster.

See slides at: http://treehouseagency.visibli.com/share/a2VGNv

video: http://archive.org/details/LetsBeUpfrontAboutPerformance