Tailoring CSS for performance
Rethinking CSS delivery
In my last article, I demonstrated how improved performance and a lower PageSpeed Insights score were accomplished by removing unnecessary external JavaScript and CSS requests. YepNope was also used to manage the asynchronous loading of external requests.
After the improvements, I thought it was time to move on but PageSpeed Insights advised there was more work to do.
Tailoring for performance
One source does not fit all
Like a lot of web teams, O’Reilly’s web group has increased its focus on using global components to better scale maintenance and optimize workflow. From a load-time measurement perspective, our performance ratings stay near benchmarks. However, after a recent analysis, using metrics other than load time, we found that our global efforts may have sacrificed performance on a handful of highly visible and heavily visited web pages.
Identifying the popular pages, we sought to improve the use of global components with server side logic, regex, and asynchronous loading. After re-measuring these popular pages, we arrived at faster load times with improved perception of speed. Read more…