In web performance, there are four key areas to focus on: reducing overall load time, ensuring the site is usable as quickly as possible, enhancing smoothness and interactivity, and optimising perceived performance. This talk will dive deep into perceived performance, where perception becomes reality—if a website feels fast, it is fast, regardless of the metrics. The perception of how quickly (and smoothly) pages load and respond is often more important than the actual load time, and while you may not be able to make your site physically faster, you can improve how fast it feels to users.

We’ll look at proven patterns and techniques from large-scale codebases to help you make your web applications both fast and feel instant, creating smooth, engaging user experiences. Topics will include optimising loading indicators, creating instant experiences with initial data, image loading optimisation, optimistic updates, pre-fetching resources and more.