Front-End Performance since 2010

Michael Pehl — the method came first, the product followed.

Timeline

  1. 2010 „Front-End Performance Optimizing“ — talk The slides that gave FEPO its name. View on SlideShare
  2. 2010 cookielessdomain.com — cookieless asset delivery, offered as a service Archived 2010–2021. See it in the Wayback Machine
  3. 2011 w3cvalidco.de — blog on front-end performance optimizing This domain. Online since 2011.
  4. 2012 responsivedesigntest.net — responsive design checker Built and run until the domain changed hands.
  5. 2014
    –26
    Contractor work for an American fintech company Built every HTML page and HTML email, from PSD to production. ASP to Node/AWS migration, Content-Security-Policy hand-rolled in production, Subresource Integrity, knowledge-based authentication and OTP flows.
  6. 2026 fepo.app — Performance Optimization as a Service Audit plus the optimised files, ready to deploy. fepo.app

2010 → today

The 2010 slides listed nine steps of the optimising process. Every one of them is an engine in fepo.app today — written down first, automated sixteen years later.

Slide, 2010Engine, today
Remove unused CSSCSS engine
Minify combined CSS / JavaScriptCSS & script engines
Use CSS spritesSVG sprite engine
Optimize image file sizeImage engine (AVIF / WebP)
Avoid HTML errors (W3C validation)Validation engine
Optimize the order of styles and scriptsHead engine
Compression, browser caching, Vary headerCompression engine

2011: cookieless asset delivery, offered as a service. Nobody booked it.
2026: every CDN does it — and „cookieless“ is a privacy argument.

Today

fepo.app — audits that hand you the optimised files instead of a to-do list: subsetted fonts, cleaned CSS, converted images, SVG sprites.

Three free tools, no account needed:

Elsewhere

Ranked 2nd in Germany’s Top 4 Page Speed Experts — NEOSEO, March 2026.