The first and most important thing you can do to improve the performance of your website’s images is figure out how to measure them. In this article, Eric Portis will show you Website Speed Test, a free and drop-dead-simple tool that leverages Cloudinary’s image smarts to let you measure, diagnose and communicate about the image performance of any website. Better yet, it’s built on top of, and integrated in, Pat Meenan’s WebPagetest. Interested? Read on!
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Moving from one image for all kinds of devices to the common one-size-per-form-factor approach is definitely a step in the right direction. The downside is that, from a performance perspective, the approach is too general. There is more juice to be squeezed. However, from a development and maintenance perspective, it might make sense because three image sizes, or breakpoints, are manageable. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will look closely at how well the one-size-per-form-factor approach really works and how you can use smart content delivery networks to improve image performance.
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Two years ago, The Russian ruble’s exchange rate slumped, and Andrew Sumin and his team had to take a look at what email consists of. At the time, they didn’t have file deduplication in place, but they estimated that it could shrink the total storage size by 36%, because many users receive the same messages, such as price lists from online stores and newsletters from social networks that contain images and so on. In this article, he will describe how he implemented a deduplication system under the guidance of PSIAlt.
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Is your website on mobile devices friends with your users? As web designers, you could often treat your users the same way the “bad guys” treat The Little Mole, especially on mobile websites. In this article, Martin Michálek goes through them and suggests best practices to optimize the user experience on mobile devices. Be kind to mobile users. Do not be the wicked old man who tries to get rid of The Little Mole in his yard. Do you want to know how the fairy tale ends? The Little Mole survives, laughs at the old man and moves to another garden.
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With a few additions, WordPress websites can accommodate a responsive image use case known as art direction. Art direction gives us the ability to design with images whose crop or composition changes at certain breakpoints. In this article, Laurie Laforest will show you how to set up a WordPress theme to support art direction in a simple manner. This method relies on WordPress’ standard administration interface as much as possible, and it requires only a single image to be uploaded.
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The best designs balance aesthetics and performance by working with mobile in mind from the start. In this article, Danny Bluestone will share the current mobile performance optimization processes he uses at Cyber-Duck. Aim to create a website that can balance aesthetics and performance on mobile, and achieve real conversion metrics. A collaborative, iterative performance optimization process will help you achieve this. Right from the start of the project, build an understanding of the client and server-side factors that determine website performance on mobile.
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Today’s SEO industry is split into two related fields: content marketing and technical optimisation. The ability to create content that resonates with audiences and communicates a brand identity is vital to the success of any website, and articles exploring every intricacy of this art can be found on the web with relative ease. In this article, Tom Bennet will be exploring three of the fundamental principles of technical SEO. By the end, you’ll be armed with a wealth of techniques for organic search optimization that are applicable to almost all established websites. Let’s get started.
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For those of us who use Varnish and also want to move to HTTPS, there is a problem: Varnish doesn’t support HTTPS. If you make the move to SSL, configuring Apache to serve your website securely, then you lose the speed advantage of Varnish. There is a relatively straightforward way to deal with this issue, and that is to stick something in between incoming SSL requests and Varnish, a layer that handles the secure connection and SSL certificates and then passes the request back to Varnish. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you how to move your website to HTTPS, taking advantage of Varnish Cache.
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Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough. As the number of mobile users grows, new apps pop up daily. To make yours a success, be strategic about how you design the “shop window” for your app — the app’s page. A/B testing and optimization of the icon, screenshots and video preview will give you a better chance of higher conversions, a higher volume of organic downloads and a better return on your investment in user acquisition.
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Most of the time, we develop websites without understanding what the browser is actually doing under the hood. How exactly does the browser render our web pages from the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that we create? Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can be very helpful when trying to profile a web page and find areas for improvement. You simply enter the URL of the page that you want to test, and the tool provides you with a list of performance suggestions. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simpler than it seems! The answer lies in the way that the CSS and JavaScript are loaded in your web page.
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