Images are a big part of the web and, yet, they can cause a lot of challenges for the user experience if not properly optimized or delivered. It’s been almost a decade since Google introduced the world to WebP as a solution to this problem. As more of our browsers, devices and software support it, it’s time that web designers started adopting it as their default image format. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you What WebP is.
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You want to build a mobile website or PWA that converts visitors into leads or customers. But with Google and consumers alike becoming ever more demanding when it comes to loading speeds, what more can you do? ImageKit, a digital image optimization service, might have the all-in-one hands-off solution you need. Today, Suzanne Scacca will focus on how you can still design with as many images as you want without slowing down your website.
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Denys Mishunov recently discussed what “Frankenstein Migration” is, compared it to conventional types of migrations, and mentioned two main building blocks: microservices and Web Components. He also showed you a theoretical basis of how this type of migration works. If you didn’t read or forgot that discussion, you might want to get back to Part 1 first because it helps to understand everything we’ll cover in this second part of the article.
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What if you spend the unproportionate amount of time to support an outdated system?
The typical answer to such a problem is the migration of the application. However, all of the front-end frameworks are different. In this article, Denys Mishunov will show you “Frankenstein Migration” which is a new, framework-agnostic approach to the process of migration that allows using the same mechanism to migrate to pretty much any framework of your choice.
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The typical website stack has gotten complex, involving many tools and technologies, and requiring automation to handle its deployment adequately. By automating all the tasks to execute, you will not dread doing the deployment, indeed you may not be even aware of it. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will take a closer look at Buddy, one of the most comprehensive tools for automating website deployments.
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The Embedded Image Preview (EIP) technique introduced in this article allows us to load preview images during lazy loading using progressive JPEGs, Ajax and HTTP range requests without having to transfer additional data. JPEG files, for which lazy loading is mostly used, have the possibility, according to the specification, to store the data contained in them in such a way that first the coarse and then the detailed image contents are displayed. Instead of having the image built up from top to bottom during loading, a blurred image can be displayed very quickly, which gradually becomes sharper and sharper.
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Do you know the impact unused CSS has on performance? Spoiler: It’s a lot! In this article, Luke Harrison will explore a Sass-oriented solution for dealing with unused CSS, avoiding the need for complicated Node.js dependencies involving headless browsers, and DOM emulation. He will then touch upon some existing solution for removing it from stylesheets.
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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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