Earlier this week I attended the first ever WeLoveSpeed conference in Bordeaux, which was the first ever edition of a conference in France, whose primary focus was web performance.
The talks were insightful and the quality was quite high with participating companies such as Google, Akamai and a number of smaller companies all focusing on performance.
Hearing CTO's of France's biggest news sites, marketplaces and websites in general (such as Ouest-France and l'Equipe) discuss how performance actually increased their revenue and helps them fight competition, as well as hearing that AMP didn't really do anything was a great 1st hand experience.
Hearing all those great talks, I've been inspired to maybe come up for a similar talk next year, but a one evolving around search performance and the impact of network latency on your search click and conversion rates as well as how much does slow UI re-rendering actually hurt your performance. The area has not really been explored that much and I think this is something where Algolia can have a real impact on.
Overall, it's hard to expose a favorite talk, but I've very much enjoyed the one of Stephanie Walter - Cheating the UX when there is nothing more to optimize which gave us a great perspective on how users actually feel about speed as well as how to incorporate performance into our design and UX mindset!
I've had the amazing opportunity to give a talk about the what are some of the optimizations we do on Algolia's websites that help us deliver a fast experience and user satisfaction, similar to the one on provided by our search. If you are interested in the talk, you can view the slides here (and please send feedback if you have it, I always look to improve my talks!) + a big thanks to everyone who listened and tweeted about it.
A big thank you to the organizers, this could not have been better!
I really mean it, you've clearly put a lot of effort and thought into making this conference happen by providing everything needed prior and during the conference! (food was great and Bordeaux is an amazing city β€οΈ)
There's a few tweets around my talk that people found interesting, maybe you will too :)
Excellent advise about 3rd party scripts by @JonasBadalic at @_welovespeed pic.twitter.com/Y6Z0ZlfzZL
— LAURENT Romain (@caedes) October 9, 2018
Great talk from @JonasBadalic about #webperf optimizations on @algoliaβs website, at #WeLoveSpeed.
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) October 9, 2018
Coucou @vvoyer ! π pic.twitter.com/48s5XSAmZ7
Learning how to be fast by default using #atomiccss & #webp images !
— ππ¦ππ΄π°π― ππ¦ ππ¦πͺπ·π’ (@nelshd) October 9, 2018
Fight for #webperf πͺ #welovespeeed pic.twitter.com/e5cYDL8tvU
@JonasBadalic on how they reinvented Algolia website : "It's like washing this car, we started with the stuff that have the biggest impact" ππ§@_welovespeed #webperf pic.twitter.com/vC1KqT8PTG
— SΓ©bastien Fourault (@SebastienKrusty) October 9, 2018
I look forward to being there next year!