Sitecore Symposium 2019: Blazing Fast Sitecore Sites

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Time is money.  Therefore, a slow site can cause you to lose money.  At Sitecore Symposium, I learned about some goals for optimizing your performance, tools to help you measure, and suggestions to get you there.

Why performance matters

• It affects your search rankings
• It affects your bounce rates
  • 32% bounce rate when your performance drops from 1 second to 3 seconds
• It affects your bottom line

Performance is the key to driving engagement

• Personalization
• Relevant content
• Performance

Performance tools

• Google Lighthouse
  • An open-source tool to measure site performance
• Performance budget calculators
  • You can try this one
  • Or this one from BundlePhobia
• WebPageTest.org
  • Simulates load from other regions

Optimization considerations

• Goal: Time to load first byte < 200ms
  • Offload to CDN
  • Optimize cache
  • Disable features you are not using
• Full resource optimization
  • DNS
  • SSL handshake
  •  Connection
  • Download size
• Calls to the origin server are slow and expensive (time-wise)

Optimization challenges

• AJAX
• Personalization
• Cache invalidation

Optimization solutions

• JAMStack: Pre-render pages
• Netlify/Sitelify CDN: Move content closer to your customers
• Akamai: CDN based personalization
•  PIIO.co: Smart images
• Change icons to SVG
• PurifyCSS: Remove unused CSS
• Load 3^rd party Javascript after the DOM load event
• Keep HTML and CSS simple: The more you have, the harder the client has to work

Hopefully, this gives you a little insight into how to have a blazing fast site. Check out my session review page for more tips and tricks from Sitecore Symposium.