Introducing the Lightning-Fast Web Performance Online Course from Catchpoint

Prior to joining the team here at WebPageTest, I released an online course called Lightning-Fast Web Performance. The course was founded upon learning materials that I had produced to teach in-person conference workshops, and made it possible to offer these materials to a wider audience online. While technical in nature, the course content was aimed not only at developers, but at web practitioners of all kinds who were interested in improving their understanding of web performance concepts and how they relate to creating faster, and more resilient experiences for their users.

That positioning acknowledged a change that was happening in the web performance world at the time and that indeed continues today. Technical web performance concepts are becoming increasingly relevant to a wide variety folks on site production teams, partly due to evolving user expectations but also due to Google’s introduction of its Core Web Vitals performance metrics as quality factors to be considered in search result ranking. Web performance has long been a team sport in which decisions from folks in many roles can make a noticeable impact on their site, both for better and worse. And yet, awareness of performance anti-patterns and the skills to recognize the source of performance bottlenecks are too-often held only by folks in specialized technical roles. Further, even when folks can diagnose a performance problem, knowing which optimizations will likely fix the problem is not always obvious. Lightning-Fast Web Performance aimed to address this broadening need for training and awareness through materials that explain web performance concepts in a holistic, while still technical and actionable manner. Since launch, I have been thrilled to find that thousands of folks have enrolled and found it helpful in their work.

#anchorA New Home at Catchpoint!

Today, I’m excited to announce that Catchpoint has acquired the Lightning-Fast Web Performance course to update it and offer it–FOR FREE!–as part of its learning materials, starting now! This investment in free video learning content is a great example of the commitment that Catchpoint has made to offer great tools and resources to the web performance community, and I am honored to know that the course will continue to live on at such a prestigious home.

You can find the course at its new home here on WebPageTest. https://www.webpagetest.org/learn/lightning-fast-web-performance/

To view all of the course chapters, you’ll need a WebPageTest account (our free Starter account or Pro accounts will both work). If you don't already have an account, you can sign up here! The course has been reviewed and updated where helpful to reflect the modern web performance landscape. While offered alongside many of our other WebPageTest-focused resources, the course retains its original neutral approach to web performance approaches and tooling, which includes a thorough (now updated) tour of our own WebPageTest tooling as well!

If you’ve taken the course in the past, or even recently signed up, first of all, thank you! To avoid any burden, we’ve left user accounts active on the prior site, but the videos are not updated and will not be maintained.

To everyone new to the course, we hope you enjoy it and find it useful! You can visit the course site for an overview of what to expect, and once you’re finished, feel free to update your socials with a certificate that says so!

Cheers!