Like all good things, Google Fonts do come with a cost. Each font carries a weight that the web browser needs to download before they can be displayed. Google Fonts are easy to implement, but they can have a big impact on your page load times. With the correct setup, the additional load time isn’t noticeable. However, get it wrong and your users could be waiting up to a few seconds before any text is displayed. In this article, Danny Cooper will explore how we can load them in the most optimal way.
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How can we improve our keyboard-only (KO) and Assistive Technology (AT) user experiences without affecting the experience for anyone else? In this article, we’ll dig into some specific, practical examples including skip links, navigation menus, modal focusing, and user education components. In this article, Aaron Pearlman is going to go over a few of those affordances that can make your KO/AT user experiences better without really changing the experience for anyone else.
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Are you using many full-sized images on your WordPress site? Take note that this is causing your pages to load slowly. A slow website affects your SEO, increases the bounce rates, and keeps your audience at a distance. There are many ways to speed up your WordPress site, each one complementing the other. In this article, Adelina Țucă will help you learn how to easily optimize all the images on your site (manually or on autopilot) in order to gain better loading times.
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Do websites created with reactive frameworks get indexed by Google and other search engines? Is it compulsory to set up pre-rendering, as your SEO consultants suggest? Or are they wrong? In this article, Paolo Mioni will talk mostly about Vue.js, since it is the framework he’s used most, and with which he has direct experiences in terms of indexing by the search engines on major projects, but most of what will be covered is valid for other frameworks, too.
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In this article, you’ll learn how you can progressively replace your JavaScript-driven lazy loading with its native alternative — thanks to hybrid lazy loading.
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Many performance optimizations can be made when we can predict what users might do before they actually do it. Resource Hints are a simple but effective way that web developers can help the browser to stay one step ahead of the user and keep pages fast. Think of them as a way for the developer to tell the browser about what’s likely to happen in the future so that the browser can factor that into its choices for how it loads resources. In this article Drew McLellan will take a look at the main types of Resource Hints and when and where we can use them in our pages.
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Since video files are large, optimizing the video to be as small as possible will lead to faster video delivery, speeding up video start, lowering the number of stalls, and minimizing the effect of the quality of the video delivered. Of course, we need to balance startup speed and stalling with the third metric of quality. In this series of posts on video performance on the web, Doug Sillars takes a closer look at how video is being used today, what we can learn from it, and how to move forward in a way that promotes fast delivery and playback of video content on the web.
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Video content on the web increases customer engagement and satisfaction. Pages that load quickly have the same effect. The addition of video to your website will slow down the page rendering time, necessitating a balance between overall page load and video content. In this aticle, Doug Sillars will examine the important metrics to balance performance and video playback on the web, look at how video is being used today, and provide best practices on delivering video on the web.
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Images are powerful. They can provide key information and context to articles, or merely add humorous asides. They do anything for us that plain text just can’t by itself. But when there’s too much imagery, it can be frustrating for users on slow connections, or run afoul of data plan allowances. In this eBook, you’ll learn all about WebP: what it’s capable of, how it performs, how to convert images to the format in a variety of ways, and most importantly, how to use it. Meet “The WebP Manual,” our latest edition to the Smashing eBook Library that covers everything you need to know about the latest image format to sweep the web!
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In this excerpt from his eBook “The WebP Manual,” developer and author Jeremy Wagner will show you the many ways you can convert your existing images to the WebP format.
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