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Web performance This is an underappreciated field that lends to plenty of consulting. As the web becomes more complex, with heavy frontend code, third party se

Web performance This is an underappreciated field that lends to plenty of consulting. As the web becomes more complex, with heavy frontend code, third party services, and demanding amounts of images and videos, it's requiring a deeper understanding about networking and browsers to keep the web performant. Compounding the problem is the growing number of users who use mobile devices to browse the web, which have larger constraints on network and hardware than desktop users. Additionally, web performance speaks to businesses because a "slow" website can impact your bottom line. There's lots of case studies about this: https://wpostats.com https://wpostats.com. For large companies with heavily-trafficked websites, this is critical as you're losing potential users/customers as a %. Google has slowly been making it a bigger objective for websites to focus on SEO-wise, especially with their latest push around "web vitals." Therefore it's becoming a higher priority for marketing departments as well. Web performance is not sexy and requires a lot of patience around analyzing websites to figure out why they're slow and coming up with specific optimizations for them. This is not like building websites. It's more like debugging. And it requires a pretty deep understanding of how websites load and run in browsers. Provided these things, I think that's partially why it's given so little attention and why so many websites perform terribly. If you're not deterred by these factors, there's a lot of businesses that could use this specialized expertise.

jakub_g 6y ago
I'm working as a webperf guy as a staff. I find the work interesting (although sometimes frustrating), but I'm not sure how many companies want to have full-time perf people onsite. As you mentioned, It's mostly consulting type of work now as far as I can tell (so might not be suitable to everyone), but maybe this will evolve or is already evolving (I've been only approached once for webperf onsite position on LinkedIn in last year, by Atlassian, but maybe because my profile is not that well LinkedIn-optimized). Anyway, if someone's interested, you can start by reading articles from: https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/ https://web.dev/learn/ https://web.dev/learn/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Performance https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Performance https://calendar.perfplanet.com/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/ https://csswizardry.com/ https://csswizardry.com/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/blog/view/7/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/blog/view/7/ And some of my own content: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/getting-started-with-web-performance-2019-beginners-guide/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/getting-started-with-we... https://jakub.gieryluk.net/slides/rivieradev/ https://jakub.gieryluk.net/slides/rivieradev/
- A_Venom_Roll 6y ago
  This looks really interesting to gain some basic and intermediate knowledge in this field, thanks a lot.
vanadium 6y ago
I currently do this for major brands as a one-man crew in a 3,500 employee company, and I'll admit, the idea of going it alone as a consultant in this space is _extremely_ alluring. It's just a matter of the right angle to get clientele in order to go it alone, which is the main stumbling block in my case due to time. The work's consistent and perfectly suited to remote, the engineering teams I'm working with are great and consistently in need of not only the what and why, but the _how_, and monitoring the progress is pretty fulfilling work, to be honest. Some of the best work I've had in a very long career. I frankly love it.
linkjuice4all 6y ago
I just moved out of the ad agency/SEO industry (using a semi-burner account for that reason) and back into full-stack development. In the past couple of years I put a lot of effort into performance analysis and improvement (mainly site speed but other critical factors) but got very little buy-in from my clients. I was also looking beyond basic "SEO metrics" and the cookie-cutter output from Google Page Speed test and even building a solid ROI model from wasted ad-spend on slow sites with high bounce rates. Is this something you're seeing a lot of demand for? If so are people actively searching it out or this just a consulting/who-you-know sort of thing?
- Ligrev 6y ago
  It's incredibly popular in the ecommerce world where every 1kb reduced is a lot. Target large ones - they often use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, BigCommerce, Magento. Also any business with embeddable products and SDKs. No one is happy to make their page heavier with a script they don't own. Fintech comes to mind. Analytics companies too. Anything with complex dashboards. Anything tailored to power users - CRMs, help desk software. Figure out your pitch too - your job may save server costs (and increase development costs but maybe don't mention that), optimize response time of employees, increase productivity, or retain shoppers.
  - postalrat 6y ago
    My experience with e-commerce sites is they they tend to accumulate enough tracking and ad network scripts to ultimately kill performance.
    - Ligrev 6y ago
      It's really quality vs quantity. Some really utilize whatever analytics tool they use, others just throw in more tools. It's a bit of a hit-and-miss industry in terms of code quality. Even the big ones.
  - ivanovb 6y ago
    Any recommendation on how to make the e-commerce world find you? And especially the large ones ? I was thinking about scouring the web for e-commerce sites with bad performance and just send them a cold email with some simple actionable items.
thettiguy 6y ago
I work for a company that optimizes page load times via a js library. We target mainly e-commerce. It’s crazy to learn how much money e-commerce will spend to improve website speed knowing it has a lift on their conversion rate. With googles page speed insights / lighthouse gaining popularity (mainly just because its google and not much else), there is definitely opportunity to focus on just improving those results and be paid very well. the load/onload/document complete event is very mature with studies correlating conversion rate. I don’t believe googles “web vitals” have been tied to any meaningful business metrics... yet.
pknerd 6y ago
Once I performed site optimization worked and loved it. Couldn't find a way to Cash it as an alternative income stream. I'd explore it again. Also web performance don't mean front end only. Most of db driven sites don't even have basic indexing done.
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  Amen brother! In the decade I spent in that space, customers always thought they had esoteric memory issues or had found some kernel bug. Nope, you just forgot to do the basics like oh dunno... check if it even runs? DB indexing? pfffttt, who does that? ;-)
  - ornornor 6y ago
    Where I work, we never ever index anything. And we use text types for every column, especially dates and IDs. Fun times.
poulsbohemian 6y ago
FWIW: I spent about a decade in application performance consulting...my own experience was that most companies only care about performance when it is costing them obvious, painful money, and even then they care just long enough to duct tape the problem and move on. I probably should write a book about my experiences because many of them show the psychosis of corporations. My point here though is that it can be a challenge field to market yourself, because there is a tendency to only make an investment when there is an emergency, rather than taking preventative steps. Once you fix the immediate problem, one would assume the client would want to insure the problem never happens again and to take remediation steps to look for other issues. Instead, my experience is that most simply do nothing until the next emergency. From what I hear, people who are security experts go through a similar customer lifecycle. All that said - I worked on lots of interesting stuff during that time and it was the most enjoyable technical work of my career.

jakub_g 6y ago

I'm working as a webperf guy as a staff. I find the work interesting (although sometimes frustrating), but I'm not sure how many companies want to have full-time perf people onsite. As you mentioned, It's mostly consulting type of work now as far as I can tell (so might not be suitable to everyone), but maybe this will evolve or is already evolving (I've been only approached once for webperf onsite position on LinkedIn in last year, by Atlassian, but maybe because my profile is not that well LinkedIn-optimized). Anyway, if someone's interested, you can start by reading articles from: https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/ https://web.dev/learn/ https://web.dev/learn/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Performance https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Performance https://calendar.perfplanet.com/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/ https://csswizardry.com/ https://csswizardry.com/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/blog/view/7/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/blog/view/7/ And some of my own content: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/getting-started-with-web-performance-2019-beginners-guide/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/getting-started-with-we... https://jakub.gieryluk.net/slides/rivieradev/ https://jakub.gieryluk.net/slides/rivieradev/

A_Venom_Roll 6y ago
This looks really interesting to gain some basic and intermediate knowledge in this field, thanks a lot.

vanadium 6y ago

I currently do this for major brands as a one-man crew in a 3,500 employee company, and I'll admit, the idea of going it alone as a consultant in this space is _extremely_ alluring. It's just a matter of the right angle to get clientele in order to go it alone, which is the main stumbling block in my case due to time. The work's consistent and perfectly suited to remote, the engineering teams I'm working with are great and consistently in need of not only the what and why, but the _how_, and monitoring the progress is pretty fulfilling work, to be honest. Some of the best work I've had in a very long career. I frankly love it.

linkjuice4all 6y ago

I just moved out of the ad agency/SEO industry (using a semi-burner account for that reason) and back into full-stack development. In the past couple of years I put a lot of effort into performance analysis and improvement (mainly site speed but other critical factors) but got very little buy-in from my clients. I was also looking beyond basic "SEO metrics" and the cookie-cutter output from Google Page Speed test and even building a solid ROI model from wasted ad-spend on slow sites with high bounce rates. Is this something you're seeing a lot of demand for? If so are people actively searching it out or this just a consulting/who-you-know sort of thing?

Ligrev 6y ago
It's incredibly popular in the ecommerce world where every 1kb reduced is a lot. Target large ones - they often use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, BigCommerce, Magento. Also any business with embeddable products and SDKs. No one is happy to make their page heavier with a script they don't own. Fintech comes to mind. Analytics companies too. Anything with complex dashboards. Anything tailored to power users - CRMs, help desk software. Figure out your pitch too - your job may save server costs (and increase development costs but maybe don't mention that), optimize response time of employees, increase productivity, or retain shoppers.
- postalrat 6y ago
  My experience with e-commerce sites is they they tend to accumulate enough tracking and ad network scripts to ultimately kill performance.
  - Ligrev 6y ago
    It's really quality vs quantity. Some really utilize whatever analytics tool they use, others just throw in more tools. It's a bit of a hit-and-miss industry in terms of code quality. Even the big ones.
- ivanovb 6y ago
  Any recommendation on how to make the e-commerce world find you? And especially the large ones ? I was thinking about scouring the web for e-commerce sites with bad performance and just send them a cold email with some simple actionable items.

thettiguy 6y ago

I work for a company that optimizes page load times via a js library. We target mainly e-commerce. It’s crazy to learn how much money e-commerce will spend to improve website speed knowing it has a lift on their conversion rate. With googles page speed insights / lighthouse gaining popularity (mainly just because its google and not much else), there is definitely opportunity to focus on just improving those results and be paid very well. the load/onload/document complete event is very mature with studies correlating conversion rate. I don’t believe googles “web vitals” have been tied to any meaningful business metrics... yet.

pknerd 6y ago

Once I performed site optimization worked and loved it. Couldn't find a way to Cash it as an alternative income stream. I'd explore it again. Also web performance don't mean front end only. Most of db driven sites don't even have basic indexing done.

poulsbohemian 6y ago
Amen brother! In the decade I spent in that space, customers always thought they had esoteric memory issues or had found some kernel bug. Nope, you just forgot to do the basics like oh dunno... check if it even runs? DB indexing? pfffttt, who does that? ;-)
- ornornor 6y ago
  Where I work, we never ever index anything. And we use text types for every column, especially dates and IDs. Fun times.

poulsbohemian 6y ago

FWIW: I spent about a decade in application performance consulting...my own experience was that most companies only care about performance when it is costing them obvious, painful money, and even then they care just long enough to duct tape the problem and move on. I probably should write a book about my experiences because many of them show the psychosis of corporations. My point here though is that it can be a challenge field to market yourself, because there is a tendency to only make an investment when there is an emergency, rather than taking preventative steps. Once you fix the immediate problem, one would assume the client would want to insure the problem never happens again and to take remediation steps to look for other issues. Instead, my experience is that most simply do nothing until the next emergency. From what I hear, people who are security experts go through a similar customer lifecycle. All that said - I worked on lots of interesting stuff during that time and it was the most enjoyable technical work of my career.