High Performance Web Sites

XCS193H

Delivery Options: Online

Course Description

People love fast web sites, but up until now developers have been focusing on the wrong area. Backend (web server, database, etc.) performance is important for reducing hardware costs and improving efficiency, but for most pages 80% of the load time is spent on the frontend (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, iframes, and others). Steve Souders, who works at Google on web performance, will introduce best practices for making web pages faster, provide case studies from top web sites, and introduce the tools he uses for researching performance. In addition to learning how to improve web performance, students will gain an understanding of the fundamentals of how the Internet works including DNS, HTTP, and browsers.

Topics Include

Backend performance.
Best practices for making web pages faster.
Fundamentals of how the Internet works.

Course Notes

Videotaped lectures and course materials for this course are the same as those for the CS193H graduate course. The on-demand format for XCS193H makes it possible to enroll in the course at anytime. The course is self-paced and includes an exam to demonstrate an understanding of the course content. Students who successfully complete the exam may request Continuing Education Units. Those students seeking Stanford University graduate credit need to enroll in CS193H when it is next taught at Stanford and complete all course requirements as part of the class cohort.

Course Preview

We also highly recommend watching the course preview to ensure you have the requisite background and understand the scope of material covered.

Prerequisite(s)

Javascript
CSS
HTML

Recommended

Professor Souders book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers is referenced throughout the course.

COURSE SECTION