How We Made VKontakte's Mobile Version Four Times Faster
summary
Mobile VK was rebuilt from a WAP site into a full SPA and then grew large, causing architectural performance regressions. The talk explains concrete front-end optimizations the team used to cut page render times fourfold: Critical Path and removing render-blocking resources, newer techniques like Early Hints, and which optimizations to prioritize or ignore. It also covers measuring impact — how faster page loads affect business metrics and how to decide and start when an app truly needs to be faster.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:50Mobile version history
- 4:25Team growth
- 6:29Site performance metrics
- 9:41Measuring performance
- 12:30Browser rendering
- 16:28Legacy code optimization
- 17:33First rendering steps
- 19:19Asset loading with 103
- 22:08Async static manager
- 27:47Static manager results
- 28:31Inline CSS and critical styles
- 31:22Blocking requests eliminated
- 34:12Final optimization results
- 36:21Business impact
- 38:29Key takeaways
- 38:50Q&A
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