Are you using progressive booting already? What about tree-shaking and code-splitting in React and Angular? Have you set up Brotli or Zopfli compression, OCSP stapling and HPACK compression? Also, how about resource hints, client hints and CSS containment — not to mention IPv6, HTTP/2 and service workers? A front-end performance checklist of things to keep in mind when optimizing for performance.
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After building several client websites, ranging from small cafés to growing startups, Stefan Judis figured out that the holy WYSIWYG editor is not always the silver bullet we’re all looking for. These interfaces aim to make building websites easy, but there are always more use cases for your content on different platforms. In this article Stefan Judis will show you what he built and how his website surprisingly turned out to be his daily companion.
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While an instant response from an app is the best, there are times when your app won’t be able to comply with the guidelines for speed. A slow response could be caused by a bad internet connection, or an operation itself can take a long time. For such cases, in order to minimize user tension, you must reassure users that the app is working on their request and that actual progress is being made. A wait-animation progress indicator is the most common form of providing a system status for users when something is happening or loading. It’s important to provide feedback to the user about what is happening with the app within a reasonable amount of time.
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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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For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, Jeremy Wagner will get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and will compare its performance to gzip.
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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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Every time the browser has to recalculate the positions and geometries of elements in the document, a reflow happens. This happens when new DOM elements are added to the page, images load or dimensions of elements change. There are many solutions for avoiding the jump effect on page load, and implementing all of these techniques would take some time, but it is totally worth it — until scroll anchoring is supported in more browsers. In this article, Michael Scharnagl will share techniques to minimize this content shifting.
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In the previous article, Clayton Anderson showed you how React Native can help you make iOS and Android apps with a shared code base, without sacrifices in quality. But what about the web? React Native for Web is intended to let you write a single app that runs in a browser using standard web technologies, or on iOS and Android as a real native mobile app. While I don’t think the project is ready for production use yet, its potential success could mark a massive change in how large multi-platform applications are built. Let’s jump in!
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In this article, Filip Bartos will share his notes about installing and configuring a critical-path performance optimization using Express and Handlebars for an isomorphic React website. This website was developed using React, running on an Express server, and it was going well, but Filip still wasn’t satisfied with a load-blocking CSS bundle. So, he started to think about options for how to implement the critical-path technique on an Express server. Throughout this article, Filip will be using Node.js and Express. Familiarity with them will help you understand the examples.
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Varnishtest can be used to test a cache invalidation method or to reproduce bugs when filing a bug report. To ensure optimal performance from a Varnish Cache deployment, one should integrate Varnishtest into the design. Varnishtest can be used by system administrators in two scenarios: (1) when configuring a Varnish Cache installation, and (2) when writing complex caching policies in the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) or when tuning Varnish Cache. Code tinkerers who work on extensions written for Varnish Cache (called VMODs) can use Varnishtest to define and test their modules.
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