Varnish Cache is an open source HTTP accelerator that is used for speeding up the content delivery of the world’s top content-heavy dynamic websites. However, the performance or speed a newcomer to Varnish Cache can expect from its deployment can be quite nebulous.
This is true for users at both extremes of the spectrum: from those who play with its source code to create more complex... Read More
Ask ten people what SEO is, and you’re likely to get ten different answers. Given the industry’s unsavoury past, this is hardly surprising. Keyword stuffing, gateway pages, and comment spam earned the first search engine optimisers a deservedly poor reputation within the web community.
Snake oil salesmen continue to peddle these harmful techniques to unsuspecting website owners today,... Read More
The web is moving toward using HTTPS encryption by default. This move has been encouraged by Google, which announced that HTTPS would be a ranking signal. However, moving your website to HTTPS is good for other reasons, too.
Rather than debate those reasons, this article assumes you have already decided to move to HTTPS. We’ll walk through how to move your website to HTTPS, taking... Read More
1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store and another 1.5 million in Google’s Play store. That’s a lot of apps, and for a growing number of mobile users. An average user in the US will download only three new apps per month (at best), according to comScore’s “US Mobile App Report.”
Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing... Read More
The web is slow, yet there are a few simple strategies to make websites faster. One of them is inlining critical CSS into the <head> of your pages, yet how exactly do you do it if your site contains hundreds of pages, or even worse, hundreds of different templates? You can't do it manually. Dean Hume explains an easy way to get it done. If you're a seasoned web developer, you might find... Read More
Responsive images have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets. The way responsive images work is that an appropriately sized image is sent to each user — small versions for users on small screens, big versions for users on big screens.
It’s... Read More
Recently, I had a project in which I needed to produce high-fidelity screens for a tablet. I was to present these screens on the device and also produce a clickable prototype. They needed to be pixel-perfect. The timeline was tight (as always), so I went with my go-to tool, Photoshop. I’ve been using it for over 10 years, and it gives me the fastest high-quality output.
Are you designing... Read More
The @extend directive in Sass is a powerful directive that facilitates the sharing of rules and relationships between selectors. However, it can produce undesirable side effects if it is not carefully implemented. Thankfully, there are many strategies for using @extend effectively that can prevent these side effects and produce clean, organized CSS.
By examining @extend in detail and... Read More
I’m a firm believer that the best way to optimize for fast-loading mobile sites is to optimize for everyone. We don’t know when someone is on a non-mobile device but tethered to their phone, or just on awful Wi-Fi.
In a previous article for Smashing Magazine I explained how you can speed up your websites by serving dynamic pages from a reverse proxy like Varnish. If you are new to... Read More
