Web Development & Performance
Web Development, Optimisation & Production Deployment
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Summary: Fast, reliable websites come from shipping less to the browser, caching aggressively at every layer, keeping database queries indexed, and deploying through a staging environment rather than editing production. Measure with Core Web Vitals field data, fix the biggest offender, and repeat.
Core Web Vitals
| Metric | Measures | Good | Common fixes |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP — Largest Contentful Paint | Loading of main content | ≤ 2.5 s | Faster TTFB, preload hero image, compress images |
| INP — Interaction to Next Paint | Responsiveness | ≤ 200 ms | Less JavaScript, break up long tasks |
| CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift | Visual stability | ≤ 0.1 | Set width/height on media, reserve ad slots |
Front-end asset delivery
- Serve images as WebP or AVIF with responsive srcset sizes
- Lazy-load below-the-fold images; never the main hero image
- Self-host or preconnect web fonts and use font-display: swap
- Compress text with Brotli or gzip
- Fingerprint static files and cache them for a year
- Use a CDN with Canadian points of presence
Server and database performance
Time to first byte depends on how quickly the server builds the page. Page caching removes most of that work; for dynamic pages, slow queries are usually to blame. Enable the slow query log and add indexes for the columns in WHERE and JOIN clauses.
SET GLOBAL slow_query_log = 'ON';
SET GLOBAL long_query_time = 0.5;
-- Later, inspect a suspect query:
EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM orders WHERE customer_id = 42 ORDER BY created_at DESC;
-- If it scans the whole table, add an index:
CREATE INDEX idx_orders_customer_created ON orders (customer_id, created_at);A safe deployment pipeline
01
Git commit
Version-controlled code
02
Automated checks
Build, tests, linting
03
Staging
Production-like copy for review
04
Deploy
Atomic release, keep previous build
05
Monitor
Errors, uptime, rollback if needed
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