Data from major Internet providers like Google, Amazon and Akamai has shown that how fast a website loads significantly affects user behavior. And because users don’t like slow sites, Google uses load time as a factor in computing PageRank results. In short: It pays to be fast.

There are a lot of factors that can affect your site’s performance. While some are dependent on your hosting environment, there are plenty of factors beyond server/internet speed (and the obvious sheer number of bits to be loaded) that affect your page load time, such as HTTP connections, DNS lookups, and asset load sequencing.

If you’re a front-end developer and you’re serious about building websites that load as fast as possible, come learn about techniques (such as non-blocking Javascript) you can use in your markup and themes — whether on WordPress or some other system — to help things load as quickly as possible. We’ll also review tools you can use to assess whether your site is doing all it can to load quickly.