Intro

Hi, I’m Fabio Cicerchia, I’m an Italian Developer, Full-Stack Web Developer. I’ve been doing some coding over the past 15 years. I’m mainly a PHP developer, but I enjoy the front-end side as the back-end side, especially the sys-admin part. So, in the last 4 years, I’ve been doing some performance optimisation of several websites, the websites were quite slow, we are talking about something like 20 seconds to load the whole page, and I decrease it to half a second. So I going to show you how I did it, so practically what I’ve done to achieve such a good loading time. So you can trust my experience of making a website faster, and I want to pass this to you.
At the moment I’m the CTO of Skuola.net.

Book’s Topic

Hi guys, welcome to my first book. I decided to talk about web performances, how to improve the speed of the website, how to make it faster, how to climb up the SERP of Google by improving the speed, which is improving as well the SEO score, the page rank. It’s going to improve the satisfaction of the users, the users will be happier to use your website and less keen to abandon it. More revenues for you, the faster, the better.
The book is, based on the speech that I had, a few months ago. Which it had many attendees on the talk, I was expecting 20 people at the most, it was during the PHP User Group in Rome, and there were 50 people, more than expected. It was a tough one, it was the first one. It took me a month just to put up the slides. The slides are showing you some facts about the performance impact, on the business side, user side, search engine.
The book shows you as well, how to improve it, using some techniques, how they’re called, and what you can do with it.
I decided to split the lessons into several levels. Each level contains a bunch of suggestions based on the level itself. The beginner will have simple stuff, the expert level needs to implement all the previous level to achieve it, you cannot just stick to the level itself, you need to do all of them.
After that, there is a section to explain which tools you can use, and another one with a list of suggested books to expand your knowledge even more.
So basically this book is not a comprehensive one, yet. It’ll be very soon because I’m going to update it over time, if something new will come up I will update it and add the lessons. If you need any help don’t hesitate to contact me, I’ll be happy to help you; send me a message, drop me an email, send me a tweet. If you have any suggestions, they are more than welcome.
I hope you’ll enjoy the book, stay tuned. Thank you again.

Web Performances

First things first, let’s define what web optimisation is.
Web optimisation aims at enhancing a website’s performance to make a more satisfying user experience. It generally deals with improving the design of a website to increase the speed of loading and page functionalities. Efficient and optimised websites increase the duration of user interaction, increase the traffic volumes and improve the search engine scores.
So let’s talk about performance. Performance is not a project, it’s a process, kind of. So it cannot be considered a project because you cannot just build a team to do performance optimisation. Optimise after you build everything is going to take a significant impact on the delivery time, it’s going to have a massive impact on the cost because some part of the optimisation process needs to be thought before the actual implementation. Some can happen after, some need to happen before.
So when someone says the premature optimisation is the root of all evil, he’s right, but the over-optimisation is the real root of all evil. So, as said, performance is a process, not a project, in every layer of the development cycle, you need to think about it. You need to think about the UI, the UX, you need to think about performance when you start writing PHP, ASP, .NET code, JavaScript code.
You need to think about performance even when you write the CSS. And you need to think about performance when you configure the web server, database server, the actual virtual machine, or, physical machine.
It’s quite a horizontal process. It’s not a project, definitely not. So because it’s a process, it involves every engineer in the building to do their part about performances, to think about performance. If everyone thinks how to make it better, a faster, lighter, the result is going to be faster.

Is all about money

So, Time is Money; I don’t need to say much about it, everyone would agree on this. Wasting time is wasting money, it’s not a good idea. You cannot buy time, so you need to make good use of it. Please don’t waste it. Don’t do the wrong thing. Just, try to make good use of it.