What is Drupal Camp NJ 2020?

DrupalCamp New Jersey is an annual, volunteer organized, three-day camp, held since 2012. Over the past several years, the camp and local community have evolved greatly due to the impact of the camp and related events throughout the year. The organizers aim for this to be one of the best camps and communities in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States.

Our Experience at this year’s Drupal Camp NJ

We are a web design company that is based in Princeton, NJ. We work primarily in Drupal and WordPress depending on the needs of our clients. Since we work in Princeton we go every year to Drupal Camp NJ. It is a great way to learn new techniques and network with other web professionals from the region and some throughout the world.

The training camp is always well put together and organized. The snacks and meals are pretty good and we learn so much by going. We also enjoy that they post the presentations and notes so that we can refer back to what we learn.

We got there grabbed a snack and went to several of the workshops. At lunch, we got together and compared notes and talked about the different sessions we went to.

We decided to go to Tools to Get Started with a Drupal 8 Project so we made our way to the room. It was in a different location than we thought it was. As we started to walk towards the door to the room we realized that the room was packed and that we are going to have to go to another workshop.

We opted for Edge Optimization in 2020. We really had no idea what it was about. But, once the presenter started talking we knew we were in the right place. The workshop was about page speed and how to increase the speed for google and end-users.

Edge Optimization in 2020

The most important thing we learned is that the optimal time to first meaningful paint is 1.3 seconds and the bounce rate increases astronomically as you add seconds to it.

• HTTPS is NOT an option
• Google is increasingly using lighthouse -Gain one rank for each 50ms to first meaningful paint better than 1.3s
• User conversions rate and Google Rankings 1.3s – 2.4s load time sweet spot, Flatten out at 5.7s
• Bounce rate increases with load time exponentially

We thoroughly enjoyed the presentation and we have been trying to figure out what were some of the best ways to speed up a site and make it work better.