Whenever we design a web application utilizing real-time data, we need to consider how we are going to deliver our data from the server to the client. The default answer usually is “WebSockets.” But is there a better way? Let’s compare three different methods: Long polling, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events; to understand their real-world limitations. The answer might surprise you.
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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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The WordPress ecosystem, which relies on a huge community of developers, enables us to constantly incorporate new features into our websites with no major effort, or at least with much less effort than is required to develop the functionality from scratch. Moving from WordPress to Netlify has trade-offs. What if we could have a WordPress website in which its dynamic content could be exported as static files? Leonardo Losoviz explains how you can combine both worlds: switch to a static site generator without having to abandon WordPress.
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Let’s be honest: It’s not the design files that become bigger by magic. It’s designers who fill their files with unused, unoptimized and hidden elements that take unnecessary space. There are huge Sketch files that exist, and not only do they slow down Sketch, but also any designer’s productivity. In this article, Ahmed Sulaiman introduces a menu bar application that is bound to help you get rid of this headache.
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Intersection information is needed for many reasons, such as lazy loading of images. But there’s so much more. It’s time to get a better understanding and different perspectives on the Intersection Observer API. In this article, Denys Mishunov is going to go out of the scroll darkness and talk about the modern way of lazy-loading resources. Not just lazy-loading images, but loading any asset for that matter. And the technique he is going to talk about today is capable of much more than just lazy-loading assets. Ready?
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We asked our readers and the community to use everything they could to make their websites and projects perform blazingly fast. Today, Cosima Mielke is thrilled to show off the results of this challenge and announce the winner who will be awarded with some smashing prizes indeed! Thanks to everyone who participated in the challenge! We were quite happy with the quality of the submissions we received, and it honestly wasn’t easy to choose a winner. Keep up the brilliant work!
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With the coming of the Client Hints, Variants and Key specifications, there’s a lot to take in, and while it can be interesting to understand how the browser works under the hood, Andrew Betts shows you some simple things you can distil from it: Browsers ignore Vary for resources pushed using HTTP/2 server push, so don’t vary on anything you push. Vary is not as useful as it could be, and Key paired with Client Hints is starting to change that. Follow along with browser support to find out when you can start using them. And much more! Go forth and be variable.
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All webmasters should strive for improving the performance of their website, and increasing their website’s security. If you’re looking for ways to increase your website’s performance and security, Jonas Krummenacher brings you five methods that are great options. Not only are they all relatively easy to implement, but they’ll also modernize your overall stack. Some of these technologies are still in the process of being globally adopted; however, as demand increases, so will compatibility. Thankfully, there are ways to implement some of the technologies for browsers that support them, while falling back to older methods for browsers that do not.
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Not too long ago, front-end performance was a mere afterthought. Something that was postponed to the end of a project and that didn’t go much beyond minification, asset optimization, and maybe a few adjustments on the server’s config file. But things have changed.
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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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