Website Performance Optimization (Udacity)

Offered by Udacity, Google,
Website Performance Optimization (Udacity)

The Critical Rendering Path. You will learn how to optimize any website for speed by diving into the details of how mobile and desktop browsers render pages. In this short course, you’ll learn about the Critical Rendering Path, or the set of steps browsers must take to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into living, breathing websites. From there, you’ll start exploring and experimenting with tools to measure performance and simple strategies to deliver the first pixels to the screen as early as possible.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Udacity's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

You’ll learn how to dive into recommendations from PageSpeed Insights and the Timeline view of Google Chrome’s Developer Tools to find the data you need to achieve immediate performance boosts!
This course is also a part of our Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree.

From Ilya Grigorik's High Performance Browser Networking:
"The emergence and the fast growth of the web performance optimization (WPO) industry within the past few years is a telltale sign of the growing importance and demand for speed and faster user experiences by the users. And this is not simply a psychological need for speed in our ever accelerating and connected world, but a requirement driven by empirical results, as measured with respect to the bottom-line performance of the many online businesses:

  • Faster sites lead to better user engagement.
  • Faster sites lead to better user retention.
  • Faster sites lead to higher conversions.

Simply put, speed is a feature."
Project:
You will optimize an online portfolio for speed, which you can share with the world to showcase your skills!
Making a great first impression is absolutely key and an online portfolio can help you stand apart from the crowd. We’ll give you a template for a modern, mobile-friendly portfolio which you’ll be able to completely customize so that it shows off your work and your skills the way you want. But before you show it off to the world, you’ll practice your web performance skills by optimizing the portfolio to render as fast as possible.

What You Will Learn

Lesson 1
Introduction

  • Intro to Chrome Developer Tools.
  • How to measure the performance of mobile and desktop websites.

Lesson 2
Critical Rendering Path

  • How are browsers and websites built.
  • HTML
  • CSS and JavaScript and the conversions to DOM and CSSOM.
  • Measuring performance via the Timeline view in Chrome Developer Tools.

Lesson 3
Easy HTML, CSS and JavaScript optimizations.

  • Adding powerful attributes to HTML tags.
  • Diagnose opportunities for optimization.
  • Key metrics to triangulate potential performance bottlenecks.

Prerequisites and Requirements
This course is for any and all web developers, whether you started learning about HTML, CSS and JavaScript recently or have been building websites since the nineties! Most importantly, you should be able to explain the overall purpose of HTML, CSS and JavaScript with respect to website structure. In addition, you should be comfortable reading and writing HTML documents and modifying JavaScript files.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Writing READMEs (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

Writing READMEs (Udacity)

In this course, you’ll learn what documentation is and why it’s an important part of the development process. You'll learn how to build a well-structured README that you’ll be able to incorporate into your projects moving forward. By the end of this course, you will have written your very own README file using Markdown.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
HTML5 Canvas (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

HTML5 Canvas (Udacity)

From Pixels to Animation! Canvas is an HTML5 element which gives you drawable surface inside your web pages you can control with JavaScript. Powerful enough to use for compositing images and even creating games. In this course, through several sample projects, you’ll learn how to use the canvas; how to make compositions using shapes, images, and text; how to create effects and filters on images and how to create animations.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
¡A Programar! Una introducción a la programación (Coursera) Coursera
University of Edinburgh,Universidad ORT Uruguay

¡A Programar! Una introducción a la programación (Coursera)

¿Alguna vez pensaste en crear tus propios juegos de computadora, pero no tenías idea cómo hacerlo o por dónde comenzar? Este curso te enseñará a programar utilizando Scratch, un lenguaje de programación visual muy fácil de usar, y más importante aún, aprenderás los principios fundamentales de la computación para que comiences a pensar como ingeniero/a de software.

Nov 16th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Algorithms, Part I (Coursera) Coursera
Princeton University

Algorithms, Part I (Coursera)

This course covers the essential information that every serious programmer needs to know about algorithms and data structures, with emphasis on applications and scientific performance analysis of Java implementations. Part I covers elementary data structures, sorting, and searching algorithms. Part II focuses on graph- and string-processing algorithms.

Nov 16th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Intro to jQuery (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

Intro to jQuery (Udacity)

Manipulating Websites with Ease. jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library today, in use by over 60% of the top 100,000 most visited websites. This course will teach you how to use jQuery’s core features - DOM element selections, traversal and manipulation. You'll also learn how to read and make sense of jQuery's documentation, making it easy for you to go beyond the methods taught in this class and take advantage of jQuery's full array of features!

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Asynchronous JavaScript Requests (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

Asynchronous JavaScript Requests (Udacity)

Fetch Data Asynchronously. This course covers everything a developer needs to know to asynchronously send and receive data in their web applications. You'll dive into how asynchronous requests work by using the XHR object to create and send asynchronous requests for image and news article data. Then, you'll see how you can perform async requests more easily using third-party libraries and APIs like jQuery's Ajax and the Fetch API.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
C++ For Programmers (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

C++ For Programmers (Udacity)

Learn features and constructs for C++. C++ for Programmers is designed for students who are familiar with a programming language and wish to learn C++. This course focuses on 'how' as opposed to 'what'. For example, in the lesson on functions, we do not teach what a function is, but rather how to create a function in C++. The lessons are taught by several different instructors who have used C++ in their professional careers, so students get to experience different perspectives.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
JavaScript Design Patterns (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

JavaScript Design Patterns (Udacity)

Organizing Code in a Disorganized World. This course covers methods for organizing your code, both conceptually and literally. You’ll learn the importance of separating concerns when writing JavaScript, gaining hands-on experience along the way. Separating concerns can be done with or without an organizational library or framework. We’ll learn how to separate concerns without one, and then we’ll explore an organizational library together. You’ll also learn strategies for exploring other libraries and frameworks on your own.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Kotlin for Android Developers (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

Kotlin for Android Developers (Udacity)

Convert an Android app from Java to Kotlin. In this course, Aaron Sarazan, Lead Software Engineer at Capital One and a leading advocate for Kotlin, demonstrates how to take a basic Android app in Java and convert it to Kotlin, teaching you key features of the Kotlin programming language along the way. This is an efficient, fast-paced introduction to Kotlin for experienced Java programmers.

Self Paced
Self-Paced