Automation for Developer Happiness

You’ve done what you need to do to create a functioning, responsive, good-looking site that works blazingly fast in your development environment. How sure are you, however, that it performs well for your users? Does it render quickly? Does it respond well to user input? Where are the bottlenecks of your site? More importantly, can you increase both the perceived and actual speed of your site?

Let’s take a dive into tools for checking site speed and improving site performance. We’ll review the available tools for cross platform, multi-device front-end performance testing, find bottlenecks, simulate our users’ experiences on our site, then automate those checks using Grunt and good old-fashioned shell scripting. In the end, we’ll be able to see how our site changes have affected our site performance, and what steps we can take to increase perceived and actual site speed.