The success or failure of a web application is heavily impacted by its performance. As MDN notes, “site speed directly affects bounce rates, conversion rates, revenue, user satisfaction, and search engine ranking. Performant sites have been shown to increase visitor retention and user satisfaction.” In this free session, Henri Helvetica will explore the rules we’ve lived by for the last decade when it comes to web performance and how these rules apply on today’s web.

14 Rules Redux

It’s 2020, and more than ever we live in an age of immediacy. We make demands for speedier processes, or at the very least - less wait times. All industries and services have scrutinized operations in ways to make product delivery as expeditious as possible.

When authoring the influential tool FireBug, Firefox’s Joe Hewitt mentioned measuring load times as an objective. The same year, some equally influential writing was published : “High Performance Web Sites”, a book by Steve Souders. Mr. Souders had introduced 14 rules for front end engineers to live by, or how he openly opined: 14 rules to faster loading web sites.

Just over a decade later, the very websites we scrutinized for speed have matured, but so has the idea of speed itself. What was once a simple stopwatch measurement has turned to a metric in part proof and perception. But what of the 14 rules? “14 Rules Redux” is curious retrospective look at how these famous 14 rules apply today in 2020 in our quest to deliver the best user experience, and load resources as quickly as possible.