In this series Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Reducing the data footprint of your website goes hand in hand with improving frontend performance. It is the single most reliable thing you can do to speed up your site. In this article, Chris puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint.
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Let’s say that you wish to compile a list of the Oscar winners for best picture, along with their director, starring actors, release date, and run time. Using Google, you can see there are several sites that will list these movies by name, and maybe some additional information, but generally you’ll have to follow through with links to capture all the information you want. Scrapy is a popular open-source Python framework for writing scalable web scrapers. In this tutorial, Daniel Ni will take you step by step through using Scrapy to gather a list of Oscar-winning movies from Wikipedia.
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Web developers know what they’re doing in terms of optimizing a website for page speed, but is it enough in Google’s eyes? When it comes to mobile loading speeds, your website can always be faster. And if you’ve implemented all of the caching, minification and other optimizations you possibly can, it’s time for the web designer to step in and get creative. As a writer, Suzanne Scacca takes care of the on-page optimizations while the developer she hands content over to does the technical SEO stuff. Web designers and developers can easily tackle the parts of speed optimization that are in each of their wheelhouses.
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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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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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Exploiting a security flaw is often about getting multiple small pieces to line up. Every bit of JavaScript you add to a site is a potential way in for a hacker. This is doubly true if that JavaScript is hosted by someone else, such as on a public CDN. Subresource Integrity is a browser feature you can use to make sure that the code being used is exactly what you intended. In this article, Drew McLellan will take a look at what SRI is, how it can help protect you, and how you can start using it in your own projects, not just for files hosted on CDNs.
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It might feel like there are some things outside of your control as a web designer or developer. Like web hosting. But what if you had a say in it? Would you know how to best advise your clients on making the right choice for the future of their website? Today, we’re going to explore Plesk VPS hosting as an option. In the following article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you why clients need the power of VPS hosting behind the websites you design for them. And why you — the administrator — need a tool like the Plesk control panel to manage it.
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It’s important to understand how animation can be used (or not used) in your design system. In this article, Val Head explains how you can help ensure that your brand is using animation consistently and effectively while also helping your team work faster. This is all about what to include in a set of motion guidelines for your design system and how to pull it off. Let’s get into it!
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Did you know that the average website is offline for 3 hours per month due to web hosting downtime? This case study by HostingFacts compares 32 web hosting services and their average uptime in 2018. To run this series of tests, John Stevens and his team have signed up for all of the 32 web hosting providers as a regular user, using the cheapest plan available. After that, they set up a basic WordPress website and start monitoring them with Pingdom.com. Their uptime check interval was set to 1 minute, which means all of the sites are scanned every minute to get the most accurate statistics.
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