As a PWA editor in the e-commerce field, web performance is more than a major issue for us; therefore, we couldn’t miss the French reference conference in this field, We ❤️ Speed whose 2021 edition was held at the Palais de la Bourse in Lyon on December 16.
First of all, we should congratulate the organizers for this particularly successful event: the organization was perfect, the venue superb and the conferences all very interesting and enriching! Some of them stand out, so here is a quick summary of our favorite conferences of this 2021 edition.
Building a webperf culture at Leboncoin (it’s much more than a Tech story!)
Or how Leboncoin is trying to stay successful after fixing major performance issues (more than 7 seconds to load the homepage). And to summarize, the recipe is this:
- Get equipped to monitor and alert in case of problems both in production but also in development, especially by implementing CI tools (monitoring bundle size, Lighthouse score,…);
Design the functionalities by taking into account the performance aspects/Core Web Vitals - This last point requires in particular the inclusion and training of the entire production chain in web performance issues, from the “product” professions to the development teams.
Micro-Front architecture, a sprinboard for web performance?
LeroyMerlin.fr underwent a redesign in 2017 by choosing the Micro-Frontends pattern. In this conference, the speakers showed us the (rather impressive) architecture of the site with notably a live demonstration of the main assets of Micro-Fronts to hold a high load while guaranteeing excellent performance and resilience to possible failures. With this type of architecture, there are also technical challenges (duplication, cache management, communication between the Micro-Fronts, etc.) and organizational issues.
In the end, contrary to the current trend towards Single Page Application, the site is globally a Multi Page Application divided into blocks (the Micro-Fronts) assembled on the server side with intelligence, advanced cache management and a few tricks.
Web performance: the integrator, the hero
Integrator, it’s time to go back to the front!
This sentence sums up this conference perfectly. The integrator can have a central (and sometimes underestimated) role in the web performance of a page. This conference reviews some examples where a good HTML/CSS integration makes all the difference! The content of the conference is available in the form of a 24 days of web post where you may learn how to sometimes do without JavaScript, how to integrate images well, how to reduce their weight, how to optimize font loading,…
Even faster than SPA?
And Single Page Applications did not keep their promise of a smooth and fast navigation? In this conference, Anthony Ricaud exposes the results of a small experiment where he compares the navigation performance in Single Page Application mode and in traditional mode (Multi Page Application) and the results go against the supposed benefit of this web application architecture. This result is sobering!
As an alternative, the speaker proposes a return to a Progressive Enhancement approach with a sensible use of JavaScript, server-side rendering (HTML Over The Wire) and current technologies like Hotwire Turbo and its companion Hotwire Stimulus.
So here are our four favorite conferences for this year, they give us grist for our future projects 🤯 but the others did not demerit, far from it! Once again, congratulations to the whole team of We ❤️ Speed, we are already watching for the 2022 edition.