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$350^.00 $450^.00 Register for this workshop → 5 × 2h live sessions + Q&A. May 7–21.
With all video recordings & slides. Get a ticket.

We’re deep-diving at each stage, building an arsenal of solutions to turbocharge our performance. We’ll weigh the pros and cons of each, so we can tailor choices to urgency, scale, tech stack, and budget, ensuring we’re equipped to make commercially-aware decisions for our businesses or clients.

The adventure doesn’t end there — we’re not just fixing issues; we’re future-proofing! Let’s explore the opportunities available using modern architecture and Web Platform APIs to craft websites and web applications that are not just fast but also robust, accessible, and user-friendly.

In this interactive, framework-agnostic workshop — you’ll learn:

• Why web performance matters and tactics to get buy-in from leaders, decision makers and clients
• How to identify performance problems early on rather than finding out from your users when regressive updates hit production
• How the 2024 Core Web Vitals — LCP, CLS and INP — are not just useful for highlighting performance problems but diagnosing where the problems are hiding
• A deep understanding of how browsers work — a foundation of knowledge that will continue to serve you no matter what the next in-vogue framework is
• How to holistically and impartially weigh up different techniques to improving performance and prioritise them to suit the unique circumstances of your business or your clients
• Mitigations to performance-affecting factors that are outside of our control
• Opportunities to use less JavaScript and have the Web Platform do the work for you
• Continuing beyond the workshop: how to stay on top of Web Platform advancements in this ever-accelerating industry

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We’ll be covering a lot of ground in the workshop, but don’t fret about being left behind, there will be plenty of time for Q&A and you’ll take away:

• A copy of the full slide deck
• A checklist of granular performance checks
• An example code repository demonstrating various techniques

Is this workshop for me?

This workshop is for web developers — people who know or suspect they have performance problems they want to solve or those who simply want to give their users a better experience.

Our analysis, architecture and optimisations will span front- and back-end in roughly an 80:20 ratio.

Whether you’re a junior or a senior, you’ll get value from this workshop – as long as you know the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the rest will assume zero knowledge

How can I convince my boss?

Regardless of the vertical your business operates in, time and time again web performance is documented as impacting KPIs.

• If you’re a publisher: you want more subscribers or ad impressions/clicks
• If you’re a retailer: you want more orders
• If you’re a charity: you want more donations
• If you’re a law firm: you want more leads
• If you’re a public service: you want to reach more of the population

Web Performance stands in the way of all of these.

If you need to convince your boss that they should grab you a ticket to this workshop, here are a few more specifics:

Publishers: Improvement to Engagement & Ad Revenue

The correlation between web performance and engagement/ad revenue is undeniable:

Financial Times added a one second delay to every page view and saw a 4.9% drop in the number of articles users read over a 7 day window. A two-second delay resulted in a 4.4% drop, and a three second delay saw a 7.2% drop. After twenty-eight days the two and three second variants both resulted in further drops in engagement.

Optimizely added artificial latency to the Telegraph and saw page views plummet: by 11% for a 4 second delay and 44% for a 20 second delay.

iCook improved CLS by 15% and saw a 10% increase in ad revenue as a result.

This web performance workshop covers a broad range of topics, from how the browser works, to the newest developments in browser technology that will help you speed up your website. Ryan has profound knowledge about these topics and is happy to discuss specific questions and give his advice. Highly recommended for all teams that want to give their web application a speed boost.

Retailers: Improvement to Revenue

For retailers, there’s a clear link between revenue drivers (conversion rate, average order value, bounce rate and traffic) and web performance:

Carpe improved Largest Contentful Paint by 52% and Cumulative Layout Shift by 41% and saw a 10% increase in traffic, a 5% increase in online store conversion rate, and a 15% increase in revenue.

Rakuten's investment in Core Web Vitals increased revenue per visitor by 53.37% and conversion rate by 33.13%

redBus improved their website's Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and increased sales by 7%

The Core Web Vitals SEO Boost

Only websites that score “Good” in all 3 Core Web Vitals get an SEO boost from Google — you can see the status in your Google Search Console.

As of writing, only 41% of the top 1,000,000 websites pass the 2023 Core Web Vitals on mobile, and it’s not much better on desktop at just 52%.

Interaction to Next Paint is replacing First Input Delay as a ranking factor in March 2024 — it has a lower pass rate meaning even more websites will be missing out.

Agency-Client Relationships

You may be working with an agency who promised the world on a new project, but they’ve under-delivered and when it hit production, performance has been terrible and you’ve had to grind your roadmap to a halt to address it — this workshop provides quick optimisations that should unlock productivity and longer-term improvements that you can implement strategically over time to stay ahead of the curve.

On the flip-side, you might be an agency looking to avoid that stressful moment when a client points out that the performance of your latest project isn’t what they expected — even when it was missing from the RFP/quote, it can still put any relationship to the test!

What do I need to bring?

All you’ll need is a free Github account for the interactive tasks. Any operating system is fine, but you’ll want the latest version of a Chromium-based browser (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave etc) installed so we’re all working from up-to-date DevTools.

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About Ryan Townsend

With 20 years of experience developing for the web, 8 of those years being as a CTO, Ryan Townsend has driven ecommerce growth for his clients measured in the hundreds of millions and now operates a consultancy offering Web Expertise and Fractional CTO services.

Web Performance has been—and continues to be—critical to his success, but to Ryan it’s not just about scoring better metrics, it’s about the broader user experience and how the ongoing operation fits within the commerciality and culture of the organisations he works with.

Outside of the office, you’ll usually find him in the gym, recording video content for ‘Lessons of a CTO’ and trying not to get too many more points on his driving licence.

Time & Schedule

This workshop is split over five days. The workshop sessions will run on the following days:

• Wed, May 7, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
• Thu, May 8, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
• Wed, May 14, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
• Thu, May 15, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
• Wed, May 21, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)

$350^.00 $450^.00 Register for this workshop → 5 × 2h live sessions + Q&A. May 7–21.
With all video recordings & slides. Get a ticket.

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Day 1 — Understand

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introduce yourself.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Why does performance matter & how do browsers actually work?

We’ll briefly discuss why performance matters – there are many impacts it has that we may not have all considered and being able to promote these can help bring about positive cultural change.

The main focus of the day will be on how browsers actually work, something few developers truly understand. We’ll have an interactive group task and gain a deep understanding of all the puzzle pieces that we can influence with how we build and optimise websites and web applications.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Ryan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 2 — Measure

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introduce yourself.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
How to think like a Performance Engineer: demystifying auditing, metrics & tooling

As Peter Drucker put so succinctly: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” — a critical skill of performance engineers is knowing what to measure, when and how.

We’ll take a look at the auditing process, how the metrics of the industry have evolved since it’s inception, how you might introduce your own custom metrics, how to diagnose problem areas and finally how to summarise all this technical detail to communicate effectively with stakeholders and non-technical staff.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Ryan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 3 — Experiment

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introduce yourself.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Applying our knowledge in practice

We’ll take part in an interactive task optimising a website, identifying it’s issues and iterating on addressing them — we’ll all experience the impact a collection of small changes over time can make, simply by consistently chipping away at the problem.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Ryan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 4 — Accelerate

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introduce yourself.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Extending our knowledge

We have an entire toolbelt of techniques for optimising websites, depending on the source of the problem. We’ll explore each of the Core Web Vitals and their influences to go beyond the low-hanging fruit to solving more complex scenarios and avoiding footguns where performance could be made worse despite best efforts.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Ryan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 5 — Prepare

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introduce yourself.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Protecting what we’ve achieved and building for the future

All of our work is pointless if performance just regresses again in future, so we’ll discuss ongoing monitoring and protections to ensure performance sticks. Finally, we’ll wrap-up look at how we build and how we can make our lives easier while simultaneously providing a better user experience by considering our architecture and relying more heavily on the Web Platform APIs provided by browsers.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Ryan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.