High Performance Responsive Design: Building Faster Sites Across Devices

Yes, you can use responsive web design to create high performance, compelling websites. With this practical book, author Tom Barker demonstrates that responsive design is not just a frontend-only approach, but also a philosophy for taking advantage of the entire web stack. Responsive design patterns and anti-patterns, derived from heavily used real-world sites, are guiding principles throughout the book.

Ideal for frontend-focused web developers, this book shows you how to incorporate responsiveness and performance into your project plan, use Node.js for device-specific functionality on the backend, and write automated tests for a continuous integration environment. You’ll explore many useful tools and responsive frameworks, and gain useful insights from Barker’s own experience with responsive design along the way.

Get a primer on web performance concepts, web runtime performance, and performance tracking tools

Write functionality with Node.js that serves up a device-specific experience to the client

Explore client-side solutions, such as lazy loading entire sections of a page—including images, styling, and content

Validate service level agreements (SLAs) by writing automated tests with PhantomJS

Examine several responsive frameworks, including the author’s server-side framework, Ripple