How important is page load time and what you can do about it (2014)
woolleydesign.net
woolleydesign.net
Instead of this one example of a very basic solution to this very specific site's problem, I would prefer to see perhaps a list of common problems and how to deal with them. "Lastly, I changed a few configuration settings to improve transfer of data by the server." what configuration settings, and how do they improve the "transfer of data"?
Perhaps also an introduction to when optimising for fast load time makes sense, and some more statistics, instead of (paraphrasing) "it makes economical sense for two of the largest companies on earth, so I guess it's important".
Also why are they debugging asset requests using webpagetest.org instead of devtools?
And it doesn't really make that much of a difference compared to asset loading. As in, a dozen js / css files and a bunch of images. Even when you compress / gzip them as best as you can and load from CDN, they still tend to take up an excruciating amount of time.
The article is good but very "beginner". The more challenging stuff is browser caching with htaccess rules etc.
Google Page Speed tests are actually very useful here and if you follow all their advice you end up with a very noticeably faster site.
* Doesn't actually explain why speed matters (hint: over 3 seconds people perceive a slow experience and over 10 seconds people will assume the site is broken)
* Doesn't say how to fix speed issues other than one specific small image/tiling "fix"
* If you worked at a real company this would never fly. The solution isn't to change the background altogether and go with tiling vs a big image.
I actually wrote an article on how to improve performance for everyone [1], and it's the biggest bang for your buck that anyone can do (designers, developers, or product folks).
[1] https://userinterfacing.com/the-fastest-way-to-increase-your...
Your article is good. But it's still incomplete, simple tasks like using a CDN / Reduce the number of HTTP calls / Caching can be implemented in an afternoon for lots of simple website, et can dramatically improve load times.
Perhaps some day I'll create a mega checklist of all things to consider to speed up a site :)
There is a number of issues with each and every tool you mentioned, e.g. color information stripped with metadata causing color shifts in wide-gamut and non-sRGB images, camera images changing orientation when Exif stripped, color banding on PNGs and JPEGs even when using Guetzli (JPEGmini is not nearly as good in other cases, but Guetzli is extremely slow), unexpected dithering noise on flat PNGs, tracing artefacts on screen recorded GIFs, JPEGs being overcompressed, poor lossless compression (virtually any online service), progressive JPEGs incompatible with Photoshop, etc.
These are just some of the problems I've been solving, and yes, there are better tools.
Magento is slow. Ofcourse you can optimize all assets but in the end Magento is still slow.
I've seen companies throwing lots and lots of money at Magento hosting to speed it up. But at the end of the day I think Magento is great for marketeers but not so great for the rest of the world.