In this article, James Rosewell outlines common challenges and how to configure Google’s new Universal Analytics to efficiently overcome them, using features such as custom dimensions, enhanced link tracking and server-side data feeds. Universal Analytics is a powerful tool, and it is prepared for a world in which designers get a single report of all interactions, including for websites, native applications and real-world events. Happy analyzing!
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“Crashes” and “Not working” are the most common feedback on Google Play for unstable or sluggish apps. Lousy apps. Those comments and ratings make hundreds of millions of potential downloaders skip those apps. Sounds harsh, but that’s the way it is. The most successful mobile app developers understand the importance of performance, quality and robustness across the array of mobile devices that their customers use. But you must know that an app can behave differently on a variety mobile devices, even ones running the same OS version and identical hardware components.
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Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn’t feel like a long journey at all. We’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last years about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. In this article you will find a little story about the things that happened on this little website over the last year. Thanks for keeping us reading throughout all these years. It means a lot. You are quite smashing indeed. You should know that.
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Responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will cover the relationship between the mobile web and responsive design, starting with how to apply responsive design intelligently, why responsive design should not be your website’s goal, and ending with the performance issues of the technique to help us understand the problem. According to Guy Podjarny’s research, 72% of responsive websites deliver the same number of bytes regardless of screen size, even on slow mobile network connections. Not all users will wait for your website to load. With just a basic understanding of the problem, you can minimize this loss.
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The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling mobile processors, network connectivity, bandwidth, latency and touchscreen keyboards. In this article, Nick Gauthier will look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile device, memorize your users’ situation, presume that their actions will succeed, and also how to predict your users’ next actions, and prepare accordingly. The mobile web is a harsh environment, but by simply focusing on what matters, you will find a clear path to a superior experience.
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In this article, Per Buer will talk about cache invalidation specifically to readers who already work with Varnish Cache. To learn more about it, you’ll find background information in “Speed Up Your Mobile Website With Varnish.”
A cache miss depends on two factors: the volume of traffic and the average time to live (TTL), which is a number indicating how long the cache is allowed to keep an object. To have a high TTL, we need to be able to invalidate objects from the cache so that we avoid serving stale content. With Varnish Cache, there are myriad ways to do this. You’ll explore the most common ways and how to deploy them.
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Imagine how your excitement after posting a blog and seeing so many visitors talking about it, turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown. Many of these mobile users access the Web via slow data connections and crowded public Wi-Fi. So, anything you can do to ensure that your website loads quickly will benefit those users. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you Varnish Web application accelerator, a free and simple thing that makes a world of difference when a lot of people land on your website all at once.
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Responsive design for images is about optimizing the process of serving images to users. In this article, Anders Andersen & Tobias Järlund will share their responsive image technique, the “padding-bottom” technique, which they researched and implemented on the mobile version of the Swedish news website Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest website). The technique presented here applies to all types of responsive websites.
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Navigation Timing API provides easy access to accurate page timing information, but it is still insufficient to draw a complete picture. Whether we need to support browsers that do not currently implement the Navigation Timing or get information about resources not included in the current page, be sure to find out more about the user’s network bandwidth or whether their support for IPv6 is better or worse than their support for IPv4. All of the techniques presented here were developed while writing Boomerang though not all of them made it into the code yet.
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The proliferation of mobile devices, increased user expectations, and the very real risks of losing customers and dropping in search result rankings have laid a heavy burden on developers to optimize loading time at all costs. The Web development community previously didn’t spend much time concerning itself with load issues and for that reason and more, Web developers aren’t conditioned to think very hard about the unique load requirements of their clients’ websites. We need to include a specification for load requirements as a regular checklist item when bidding and planning Web work.
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