Responsive AND Fast websites, Optimising Live!

On 3rd March 2015 at The Financial Times as part of Responsive AND Fast websites, Optimising Live!

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is quickly becoming the standard way any organisation should tackle the post-iPhone web. The client-side approach it embraces makes adapting to the current device easy – and makes it just as easy to make your site painfully slow. In many situations, the daunting task of performance optimisation is pushed out by business requirements and timelines.

Improving the performance for RWD sites doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming! This presentation will show how we can take a Responsive site and by making key changes can improve the performance for different screen resolutions, network conditions and devices. We will take a “naïve” RWD site, transform it, and make it fast using commonly available tools and techniques.

During this meetup, we’ll put an average RWD site on a 90-minute makeover (40mins talk / 10 min pit stop / 40mins talk) and show how better performance doesn't have to be a big job by:

- Reducing bytes transferred and total number of requests

- Exploring responsive images, optimised media queries, conditional loading

- Exploring RESS while maintaining cacheability and performance

- Benchmarking performance with each iteration to show results