Measuring Front-end Performance & High Performance Images

Measuring Front-end Performance: What, When and How?

by: Gareth Hughes (https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/gareth-hughes/17/743/2ab), Web Performance Enterprise Architect at Akamai Technologies

During this session we will look at the art of monitoring the front-end performance of your web site or application from inception to production.

We’ll start be looking at what measurable metrics are available, and how they can be used to represent performance and user experience. Moving on to looking at how we can measure and control performance throughout the development lifecycle, including a look at some of the tools available for measurement and reporting.

High Performance Images

by: Tobias Baldauf (http://who.tobias.is/), Senior Web Performance Solutions Architect at Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/)

Today's average website is 62% pure image data. We use images to convey emotion, elicit an action or simply to amuse our peers. They show holiday photos, pie charts or animated cats.

To the unitiated, nothing much has changed since the JPEG file format was standardized in 1992 and GIFs became capable of showing multiple frames of cat mischief.

But under the hood, the complex realm of raster and vector images is ever changing: new encoders use cues from the fields of computer vision and machine learning to optimize image data, old formats learn new tricks and completely new image formats try to take the stage.

To deliver a great user experience, we need to learn to create high performance images and implement an image management strategy: leveraging the ideal image file formats and use advanced techniques to handle the challenges of responsive designs and situational performance.

High performance images increase the perceived performance of your website, improve the user experience and drive conversions.