Speed matters. It matters to users. Your site has to load fast or users will leave. It matters for SEO. Your site has to load fast or search engines downgrade your ranking.

With that in mind, let's take a moment to take stock of the portfolio site in Chapter 2, Bootstrappin' Your Portfolio. Specifically, let's look at a key page speed factor that we can easily control, the size of our asset files—images, CSS, and JavaScript. With just a few steps, we can drastically reduce our site's footprint and improve load times.