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| title | About Harry Roberts |
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| meta | Harry Roberts is an independent web performance consultant based in Leeds, UK. He helps teams improve site speed, front-end performance, and Core Web Vitals. |
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| lux | About |
Hi, I’m Harry. I help teams understand how site-speed affects their business, improve Core Web Vitals, and find the real bottlenecks. I’m an independent web performance consultant based in Leeds, UK.
I’m an invited Google Developer Expert and Cloudinary Media Developer Expert. I’m also an international speaker and co-chair of performance.now(), a web performance conference for professionals.
Alongside my client work, I’ve published over 240 articles on CSS Wizardry. I’ve also delivered over 150 conference talks on web performance, site-speed, and front-end engineering. Since 2009, my writing and teaching have informed and improved the work of individuals and teams around the world. Heard enough?
- About
- Colophon
- Why CSS Wizardry?
- Interviews
I have many years of professional experience and have worked independently for more than a decade. Clients including the United Nations, Google, the BBC, General Electric, and many more have trusted me with their work.
<script> const currentYear = new Date().getFullYear(); const yearsOfExperience = currentYear - 2008; document.querySelector('.js-date').textContent = yearsOfExperience; </script>My work sits somewhere between engineering, troubleshooting, and enablement. In practice, that means:
- auditing a site to uncover what is really holding it back;
- working alongside a team to get fixes shipped; or
- helping leadership understand what performance is costing them and where the strongest returns are likely to come from.
More often than not, it means some mixture of all three.
Through consultancy, performance audits, implementation support, and training, I help teams build faster, more resilient websites and stronger web performance practices around them.
There is a short list of people I whole-heartedly recommend for detailed performance work and Harry is right there at the top.
Tim Kadlec
The two things I care most about are practicality and outcomes. Fast websites are good, but they aren’t an end in themselves. What matters is what that speed unlocks: better experiences, healthier conversion rates, stronger Core Web Vitals, and more confidence in the product itself.
I work with companies of all shapes and sizes, across a range of industries, countries, and team structures. The work might be a forensic performance audit, help fixing a specific issue, training for engineers, or a longer-term partnership. In a longer partnership, I help the team build performance thinking into the way it works. All of that is squarely in my wheelhouse.
If you need a faster website, better Core Web Vitals, a detailed performance audit, or a clearer understanding of your biggest opportunities, I can help. I’m comfortable in the weeds with engineers. I’m just as comfortable helping stakeholders understand the commercial side of web performance work.
If that sounds useful, say hello. I’m professional, but pretty laid back, and I’m always happy to see whether there’s a good fit.
- About
- Colophon
- Why CSS Wizardry?
- Interviews
CSS Wizardry uses tools and services that make my life as a developer much, much simpler.
I build CSS Wizardry with Jekyll, an open-source static site generator. GitHub Pages hosts the site, and Cloudflare serves it.
I write the CSS in Sass and build it on inuitcss. inuitcss is a free, open-source, Sass-based, object-oriented CSS (OOCSS) framework. It focuses on performance, scalability, and a small footprint. The site also uses ITCSS, a CSS architecture I created to help CSS projects grow and remain maintainable.
The site is intentionally fairly lean. It uses your system font to feel familiar and improve performance. SpeedCurve and Treo help keep CSS Wizardry fast.
The photograph used on the homepage’s masthead is of me speaking at Digital Labin, and was taken by Marin Cuk Vurnek of EVENTography.
You can view CSS Wizardry’s roadmap and task list on a public Trello board. You can also find all of the code that powers it on GitHub. Feel free to take a look round, but please don’t steal anything.
- About
- Colophon
- Why CSS Wizardry?
- Interviews
I chose the name CSS Wizardry when I was 17 years old. I had read Andy
Budd’s CSS
Mastery,
become mildly obsessed, and then very unoriginally registered csswizardry.com.
I would not necessarily recommend letting teenagers pick their own domain names.
My early career really was rooted in CSS architecture and design systems, so the name made perfect sense for a long time. For the best part of a decade, my work has focused much more squarely on web performance. The name has stuck, and at this point I suspect it probably always will.
- About
- Colophon
- Why CSS Wizardry?
- Interviews
- 2017-06-13: ScriptCast
- 2017-06-13: Non Breaking Space Show
- 2016-11-10: Hacking UI
- 2016-10-20: Hashnode
- 2016-09-14: The Web Platform Podcast
- 2016-09-14: Honeypot
- 2016-08-23: Toolsday.io – Travel Tools
- 2015-03-10: CSSConf Australia
- 2015-02-10: Being Freelance – CSS Wizard Harry Roberts – Developing Consultant Magic
- 2015-02-07: Unfinished Business – Two old farts looking at their calendars
- 2014-12-04: ColourSpaces
- 2014-11-09: DaFED
- 2014-10-02: PSDtoWP – 3 beloved front-end development tools
- 2014-09-29: Unfinished Business – A cage full of hungry dogs
- 2014-06-05: CDNify – An Interview with CSS Expert Harry Roberts
- 2014-05-20: Insurance By Jack – How To Get Started With Public Speaking
- 2014-04-24: FOWD – 10 Minutes ’til the Future – Live from FOWD edition
- 2014-04-04: Workspiration
- 2014-04-03: Sitepoint – CSS Framework Fortunes and Failures with Harry Roberts
- 2014-03-14: Responsive Design Weekly – Responsive Interview with Harry Roberts
- 2014-02-15: net mag – Harry Roberts on big CSS, working for Sky, and being a home bird
- 2014-01-06: Alex Carpenter — Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry
- 2013-11-08: Web Payload – Why not to use IDS? The tipping point, inuitcss, and frameworks
- 2013-08-10: Unfinished Business – Almost as controversial as putting the milk in first
- 2013-05-15: Steer – An interview with Harry Roberts
- 2013-04-26: Web Courses Bangkok – An Interview With Harry Roberts – Front-end Architect and Speaker
- 2013-04-25: net mag – Use shame.css to house hacks
- 2013-03-22: Up Front Podcast – CSS with Harry Roberts
- 2012-11-29: Shop Talk Show
- 2012-10-15: Martin Wolf – Interview with CSS wizard Harry Roberts
- 2012-08-30: Young Guns Show – Scalable CSS with Harry Roberts
- 2012-03-06: Nu Blue – Off to see the Wizard