Responsive & Fast : Implementing High-Performance Responsive Design

by Guy Podjarny

Is Responsive Web Design (RWD) slowing your site down? It doesn’t have to. With this concise book, you’ll learn practical techniques for improving performance with RWD, including a default set of guidelines you can use as an easy starting point. Web performance researcher and evangelist Guy Podjarny walks you through several existing solutions for dealing with RWD performance problems, and offers advice for choosing optimizations that are more promising than others.

RWD performance problems stem from excessive downloads of resources, including images, JavaScript and CSS, and HTML—downloads designed to let your web application adapt to different screen sizes. Podjarny presents a series of increasingly larger-scope solutions to each issue, including client-side techniques and RESS (Responsive + Server Side Components).

Address performance issues by starting with Podjarny’s default guidelines
Use a JavaScript image loader and an image transcoding service to create Responsive Images
Reduce JavaScript and CSS downloads with asynchronous scripts, conditional loading, and multi-viewport CSS
Prioritize resources to avoid excess content in RWD and defer the load of any content that’s not critical
Explore server-side Adaptive Delivery and RESS solutions as an alternative to “pure” RWD
Guy Podjarny, or Guypo for short, is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Akamai’s Web Experience business unit.

49 pages, ebook

First published June 3, 2014

Reviews

[Aleš Roubíček · Rating 4 out of 5]

Velmi krátká, ale zato úzce zaměřená kniha na to, jak dělat responsivní weby pořádně. Pro dokreslení technik RWD, aby to začalo dávat smysl, je to určitě must have.

[Dhuaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compilation of RWD optimization knowledge. It's a good book to push at people who are getting into RWD and are working on big websites, but if you have been following the various articles on the subject, you won't learn anything new. The book doesn't present many ready solutions with code, but discusses the problem and possible solutions. It makes it less technology-dependent and it likely will stay relevant for longer, but it also means advanced developers won't have much use for it.

Many solutions are overkill for small sites and the ones that aren't IMHO fit into best practices that aren't strictly related to RWD (merging files to avoid network latency). There's a nicely sized section about responsive images, which IMHO is a big problem, and from which I learned something new (Client Hints). I would have liked more about over the fold CSS, but I guess this is still a new subject.

There wasn't much about CSS performance, custom fonts, or HTML gimmicks imparted by design.

All in all, it's short and worth checking out to see if some new technique has popped up, but it's not a must have and not a complete compendium.