Categories
Building buy-in Distributed Teams Frontend Optimization Performance Engineering

Making an Operations Excellence Frontend Excellent

(Bluxome Labs : 4/18-4/18)

For the client, I probed their UX using multiple tools to determine low-hanging fruit, worked with the CTO and VP PROD to understand resourcing constraints given the product roadmap, and enumerate several tactics in a (prioritized) phased approach towards improving performance.

Heuristic discoveries included FE perf bottlenecks such as:

  • multiple inline JS snippets causing slowdowns
  • un-optimized JS libs, including of React components
  • multiple 3rd party JS libs that were no longer necessary
  • JS libs that loaded neither async nor defer
  • retrieval of multiple styling resources

I found that the greatest opportunity to optimize existed for two key user experiences at ~6s avg page load and ~4.5s average page load respectively.

During one iteration, changes lead to a 52% reduction in the Webpack bundle of React components, improving page speed by 10% or better across four key user experiences.

During another iteration, one key UX was sped up by 39.4% without Cache, 53.8% with Cache.

During a final iteration, changes lead to a 20% page speed improvement on one key user experience and 10% or better on two others.

Results

  • Introduced Performance Engineering mindset leading to 20% page-load speedup.
Categories
Leadership Optimization Performance Engineering supply-side

Improving Speed and Conversions

With no-one on staff having formal performance engineering experience or training, I led the effort to address a 6s sitewide page load average. Over approx. 6 months, stealing time from each sprint as I could given other responsbilities, I assessed bottlenecks using performance tools, including procuring a contract for Insights, Browser Pro, and Synthetics.

In a nutshell, assessing some of the pages having a roughly 13s page load, skewing the overall site’s average, I determined that the bulk of the performance issues were in blocking JS libs and then crafted a remediation strategy and established SMART goals for baselining/measuring impact of changes quarter-over-quarter with intent to drop from 6s to 3.5s by the end of 2017. Below you’ll see a spreadsheet I kept, noting the average Page Load Speed every Monday morning. Finally, in May, we address the bulk of the blocking JS libs and reversed the upwards trend.

The CEO was amazed at how much faster the site felt.

Results

  • Intro’d performance engineering, leading to page load speed reduction by one full second and 11% bump in mobile web conversions.