Django programmers might quickly overlook frontend performance because it deals with understanding how the client side, usually a browser, works. However, let's quote Steve Souders' study of Alexa-ranked top 10 websites:

A good starting point for frontend optimization would be to check your site with Google page speed or Yahoo! YSlow (commonly used as browser plugins). These tools will rate your site and recommend various best practices, such as minimizing the number of HTTP requests or gzipping the content.

As a best practice, your static assets, such as images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files, must not be served through Django. Rather a static file server, cloud storages such as Amazon S3, or a content delivery network (CDN) should serve them for better performance.

Even then, Django can help you improve frontend performance in a number of ways:

• Cache infinitely with CachedStaticFilesStorage: The fastest way to load static assets is to leverage the browser cache. By setting a long caching time, you can avoid re-downloading the same asset again and again. However, the challenge is to know when not to use the cache when the content changes.
  • CachedStaticFilesStorage class solves this elegantly by appending the asset's MD5 hash to its filename. This way, you can extend the TTL of the cache for these files infinitely.
  • To use this, set the CACHES setting named staticfiles to CachedStaticFilesStorage
    or, if you have a custom storage, inherit from CachedFilesMixin. Also, it is best to configure your caches to use the local memory cache backend to perform the static filename to its hashed name lookup.
• Use a static asset manager: An asset manager can pre-process your static assets to minify, compress, or concatenate them, thereby reducing their size and minimizing requests. It can also preprocess them, enabling you to write them in other languages, such as CoffeeScript and Syntactically awesome stylesheets (Sass). There are several Django packages that offer static asset management such as django-pipeline or webassets.