One of my obsessions as of late has been page speed. A more technical client early last year made me realize I’d phoned it in for the page speed recommendations that I’d been including in my SEO Site Audits. You know the ones, minifying code, removing inline styles and JavaScript, specifying image dimensions, leveraging compression, etc. So in the last 9 months I’ve taken a dive in to improve my understanding of networking, the critical rendering path, what every single thing in PageSpeed Insights actually means and generally acclimating with the latest in front end development best practices. It’s safe to say I’d spent too much time with my marketer hat on and not enough time staying on top of my original skillset.
In coming across the phenomenal work done on the subject by Ilya Grigorik, I learned about a directive called rel-prerender which has effectively allowed me to speed up this very site by over 68% with one line of code…
