Optimizing for performance can fall by the wayside when developing in a fast-paced environment such as the Informatics Innovation Unit (IIU). The IIU team strives to rapidly build out web application prototypes. Often, to get a prototype “into the hands” of our clients as quickly as possible, we are forced to adopt a “we’ll get to that later” philosophy. This issue came to the forefront when, out of curiosity, I tested our sites through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and was surprised to learn that, even though our sites ran well in our testing and production environments, our sites had page weights of more than 3mb and scored relatively poorly on their speed tests. This result was well over the average of 1.7mbs, which meant that for slower connections our sites would have a prolonged load time.
Luckily there were some fairly simple actions we could take to reduce page weight and improve site performance. I wanted to highlight a few of them here with focus on how to accomplish them when working with full stack JavaScript applications since that’s what we focus on in IIU…
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