Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. If you want to use web fonts your choices are basically Flash of Invisible Text (aka FOIT) or Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT). Neither option has really “won out” because neither is really satisfactory, to be honest. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts.
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At the moment of adding authentication and authorization to our web applications, there are some things that we should evaluate, e.g. whether we need to create our own security platform or whether we can rely on an existing third-party service. Let’s see how we can implement authentication and authorization in Next.js apps, with Auth0.
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Google’s “Page Experience Update” will start rolling out in June. At first, sites that meet Core Web Vitals thresholds will have a minor ranking advantage in mobile search for all browsers. Search is important to any business, and this is the story of how Beau Hartshorne and his team at Instant Domain Search improved their Core Web Vitals scores. Plus, an open-source tool they’ve built along the way.
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When tackling a big refactor, what are the things you should focus on and what performance improvements can you expect? Dealing with themes for large platforms and CMS, legacy issues often become a bottleneck. In this article, Carson Shold discusses how his team improved the performance and organization of their Shopify themes, and improved maintainability along the way.
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This article showcases a case study of Bookaway’s landing page performance. It’s about a couple of things that Bookaway faced and Liran Cohen (as part of a company in the traveling industry) managed to optimize the pages, so that the HTML they send is smaller. Smaller HTML means less time for Google to download and process those long strings of text. Today you’ll see how taking care of the props you send to Next.js pages can make loading times and Web Vitals better.
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Images have also been a key part of the web. They communicate ideas instantly, but they are also a lot heavier than text to load. This means that it’s essential to get loading and displaying them right, if you want to give your users a fantastic first impression. An excerpt from Addy Osmani’s new book (also, check a free PDF preview). We’re happy and honored to have teamed up with Addy to publish a dedicated book on image optimization, and the book is now finally here!
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The cat is out! For the last year, we’ve been working with Addy Osmani on a new Smashing Book all around image optimization. And now it’s here. Meet “Image Optimization”, our practical modern guide to delivering high-quality images on the web with the best performance. Image optimization, loading behavior and rendering in the browser require understanding of image formats and image compression techniques, image decoding and browser rendering, image CDNs and adaptive media loading, not to mention effective caching and preloading. Let’s figure it all out.
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How are Core Web Vitals measured? How do you know your fixes have had the desired effect and when will you see the results in Google Search Console? Let’s figure it out! In this post, Barry Pollard is going to attempt to explain a bit more about what’s going on here and explain some of the nuances and misunderstandings of these tools.
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How do we get media performance right while staying within performance budgets? In this article, Akshay Ranganath will take a look at the recent stats and data around performance budgets, video playback performance issues and some techniques and tools to address these issues. Having a performance budget as a standalone metric might not be of much help. That’s why we must correlate performance to organizational goals.
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Wondering what’s happenin’ at Smashing? Well, we’ve been busy. Here’s a little story of how we removed floating labels, improved performance on mobile, and launched a new series of articles. Oh, and how you can contribute to Smashing, too.
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