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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With mobile traffic increasing on local business websites, web developers and designers are now tasked with a new responsibility. It’s no longer enough for websites to rank well — they need to rank well in local search results, too. As mobile users demand more information about local businesses, your websites need to be creative in how that data is served to them in search and through design. You can use these seven mobile design strategies to do so. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you how to use mobile web design to improve local search ranking.
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Not sure how to remove the code debt that bloats and weighs down your site? In this article, Jon Raasch will show you the quantitative benefits of optimizing page speed. This guide will give you the tools you need to convince others. Here are specific ways mobile performance impacts your site and page speed results. It’s time to change our mindset.
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Linking JavaScript functionality to the DOM can be a repetitive and tedious task. In this article, Rik Schennink explains how ConditionerJS can help make websites more flexible and user-oriented. Step-by-step he’ll improve this logic, and finally, he’ll make a 1 Kilobyte jump to replacing it with Conditioner. By combining all of the following tiny changes, you can speed up page load time and more closely match your functionality to each different context. This will result in improved user experience and as a bonus improve our developer experience as well.
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We all want to load images fast on the web. Choosing the right image format, optimizing the quality and using responsive images are important tasks, but what can we do beyond that? As developers, we need to measure performance. We should care more about the loading experience of the websites we build. It’s great that we now have tools such as WebPageTest and Lighthouse that can help us easily measure the effect of using progressive image loading techniques. No more excuses!
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In this article, Aidan Sliney is not going to make you the next Instagram, but he will hopefully help you get a nice base level of users that you can grow from. The example app in this article received 100,000 downloads in eight weeks. This is with a marketing budget of zero and very little work since launch. Aidan will cover the basic app store optimizations that will help bring people to your Google Play page. Getting them to download and stay is up to you and up to the value your app provides. Of course, to get traction, you need to pick a topic in which enough people are interested, and then the quality of your build is what is going to help keep these users.
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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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