Smashing Magazine

OCTOBER 24, 2023

Writing a hand-spun analytics tracking dashboard isn’t what my clients really want to pay me for, so I’ll drop in the ol’ Google Analytics script and maybe never think of it again. Let’s look at it for a site that’s much “heavier” than Smashing Magazine. There are self-hosted alternatives to Google Analytics, after all.

Google 94

Google Analytics Traffic Metrics 94

Smashing Magazine

DECEMBER 17, 2020

The most beautiful, spectacular site in the world won’t do anyone much good if people can’t find it on Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo). Following best practice usually means a better website, more organic traffic, and happier visitors. Google Keyword Planner. Google Trends. Google Mobile-Friendly Test.

Engineering 132

Engineering Google Website Mobile 132

Smashing Magazine

OCTOBER 31, 2023

Why do we need Lighthouse at all when Google also offers similar reports in PageSpeed Insights (PSI)? CrUX data is important because it is how web core vitals are measured, which, in turn, are a ranking factor for Google’s search results. From an SEO standpoint, the 28-day Google CrUX data is the gold standard.

Speed 100

Speed Google Website Metrics 100

Smashing Magazine

AUGUST 9, 2021

For example, if the device is a firewall, it might be configured to block all traffic containing (unknown) extensions. In practice, UDP is mostly used for live traffic that updates at a high rate and thus suffers little from packet loss because missing data is quickly outdated anyway (examples include live video conferencing and gaming).

Transportation 145

Transportation Internet Internet Network 145

Smashing Magazine

NOVEMBER 8, 2021

As any seasoned team will know, building the storefront capabilities is one thing, and running it at a production scale that is able to absorb large waves of traffic, driven by flash sales or breakout social campaigns, is a whole other and massive operational challenge. “It Commerce At Shopify Scale: Hydrogen Powered By Oxygen.

Cache 137

Cache Best Practices Strategy Servers 137

Smashing Magazine

JUNE 25, 2021

For this, you can use such well-known tools as Semrush and SimilarWeb and reviews from Trustpilot , Google Play , and Apple’s App Store. The tool analyzes edX’s rank, traffic sources, advertising, and audience interests. edX analysis on Google PageSpeed ( Large preview ). First, I analyzed statistical data about the platform.

Education 86

Education Website Google Design 86

Smashing Magazine

AUGUST 3, 2023

It increases our visibility and enables us to draw a steady stream of organic (or “free”) traffic to our site. While paid marketing strategies like Google Ads play a part in our approach as well, enhancing our organic traffic remains a major priority. The higher our organic traffic, the more profitable we become as a company.

Performance 75

Performance Cache Traffic Metrics 75

Smashing Magazine

AUGUST 10, 2023

For example, the data is limited to Chrome users who are logged into their Google account, so it’s not completely representative of all users. It’s another type of real-user monitoring takes real traffic from your site and sends the information over for extremely accurate results.

Speed 82

Speed Monitoring Testing Network 82

Smashing Magazine

JUNE 1, 2022

They can also highlight very long redirection chains in your third-party traffic. The most popular, by far, is the Google Lighthouse report (available in Chrome Developer Tools) and Google’s Page Speed Insights. Configuring WebPageTest to run a test measurement that simulates a failure of the Google Fonts third-party service.

Website 133

Website Design Network Testing 133

Smashing Magazine

SEPTEMBER 6, 2021

mvfst (Facebook), MsQuic , (Microsoft), (Google), ngtcp2 , LSQUIC (Litespeed), picoquic , quicly (Fastly). Note that there is an Apache Traffic Server implementation, though.). Traffic for one connection must, of course, always be routed to the same back-end server (the others wouldn’t know what to do with it!). Implementation.

Network 108

Network Servers Cache Traffic 108

Smashing Magazine

DECEMBER 14, 2021

The ability to modify the headers of traffic that pass through your browser is a great tool to have. Puppeteer is a Node library developed by Google which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. That was when I first got to witness the power of network headers.

Testing 103

Testing Network Website Google 103

Smashing Magazine

JULY 29, 2019

Google Homepage — DOM. This isn’t useless JavaScript; Google has to have some in order to display suggestions as you type. For comparison, I disabled JavaScript and reloaded the page: The disabled JS version of Google search was only 102 KB and had just 5 network requests. Google Dev Docs. 402 KB transferred, 1.1

Cache 97

Cache Mobile Google Network 97

Smashing Magazine

JUNE 25, 2020

This strategy is very simple and closely resembles the development environment, but cannot handle large or inconsistent amounts of traffic effectively. Browsers perform their own caching operations, but if your site enjoys substantial traffic, you can optimize your client-side caching behavior using Django’s cache framework.

Media 70

Media Cache Storage AWS 70

Smashing Magazine

APRIL 11, 2022

Loading experience is crucial to the user’s first impression and overall usability, so Google defined Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric to measure how quickly the main content loads and is displayed to the user. It’s common knowledge that better website performance results in more conversions, more traffic, and better user experience.

Media 71

Media Tuning Metrics Google 71

Smashing Magazine

NOVEMBER 5, 2021

Canvas Chrome, Google Jamboard, Miro, and Mural, are four examples of many online collaboration spaces that exist to serve the needs of remote co-creation. You can conduct these types of interviews remotely, however it might be difficult if you have a tangible artifact or want someone to build on your concept using craft material.

Design 101

Design Testing Education Processing 101

Smashing Magazine

DECEMBER 19, 2021

Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study. Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study. I’m a big fan of Smashing Magazine and am very interested in web performance and the Core Web Vitals. From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t really matter what other tools tell you, GSC is what Google Search sees.

Google 143

Google Traffic Mobile Website 143

Smashing Magazine

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

If you’re into each month overviews with more detailed data, take a look at these pages below: Detailed Google Spredsheet (1st of January to 31st of December 2018). But does it really matter to get a refund or some credit when your website has lost all its traffic because of its non-existent performance? (ms, MidPhase.com.

Testing 50

Testing Website Servers Availability 50

Smashing Magazine

MARCH 19, 2021

The final prompt for a more aggressive optimization was the “Core Web Vitals” dashboard in the Google Search Console. We first thought that it could be related to the cookie banner adjustments we made recently, but it turned out it was a Google Search Update that seemed to be more aggressively penalizing us for a high CLS.

Mobile 141

Mobile Design Cache Code 141

Smashing Magazine

AUGUST 30, 2021

Also, the management will be dissatisfied with the decreased traffic and revenue caused by the unoptimized codebase, despite the code quality improvements. This is exactly how Smashing Magazine handles its stylesheets. Deferring font stylesheets (Google Font files, for example) could also be beneficial for initial render performance.

Media 112

Media Performance Cache Strategy 112

Smashing Magazine

AUGUST 22, 2021

One of the reasons Google saw very good 0-RTT results for QUIC was that it tested it on its already heavily optimized search page, where query responses are quite small. Initial tests by Google , for example, show low percentage improvements for its use cases. This is why there is a split between client and server CIDs in QUIC.

Performance 107

Performance Network Latency Servers 107

Smashing Magazine

JUNE 8, 2021

For a thorough guide on image optimization, we’ve teamed up with Addy Osmani , an engineer manager working on Google Chrome who was working all around web performance for decades. For sites with large traffic and a global reach, basic optimizations at build time are usually not enough. Let’s figure it all out. Get the eBook.

Media 109

Media Cache Google Best Practices 109

Smashing Magazine

MARCH 7, 2022

Approximately two-thirds of Indian mobile Chrome users of Smashing Magazine have this setting turned on, for example. However, the above table is not actually representative of total traffic, and that’s another point to note about this data. For Smashing Magazine, that involved dropping some of our web fonts. And Is It Used?

Website 105

Website Media Mobile Network 105

Smashing Magazine

APRIL 28, 2021

For a thorough guide on image optimization, we’ve teamed up with Addy Osmani , an engineer manager working on Google Chrome and focusing around performance for decades. For sites with large traffic and a global reach, basic optimizations at build time are usually not enough. Let’s figure it all out. Image Content Delivery Networks. +.

Media 94

Media Cache Google Best Practices 94

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 21, 2021

A big JavaScript bundle might seem out of place on a magazine that merely publishes articles, but actually, there is plenty of scripting happening behind the scenes. CrUX generates an overview of performance distributions over time, with traffic collected from Chrome users. Large preview ).

Performance 111

Performance Cache Mobile Network 111

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 6, 2020

Run performance experiments and measure outcomes — both on mobile and on desktop (for example, with Google Analytics ). For Mac OS, we can use Network Link Conditioner , for Windows Windows Traffic Shaper , for Linux netem , and for FreeBSD dummynet. Adjust the argument depending on the group of stakeholders you are speaking to.

Performance 112

Performance Cache Network Servers 112

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 7, 2019

For Mac OS, we can use Network Link Conditioner , for Windows Windows Traffic Shaper , for Linux netem , and for FreeBSD dummynet. In 2015, Google introduced Brotli , a new open-source lossless data format, which is now supported in all modern browsers. On Smashing Magazine, we could measure 19-32% improvement , too.

Performance 105

Performance Cache Metrics Network 105

Smashing Magazine

OCTOBER 11, 2022

Terabyte of wasted traffic. Do you really need Google Analytics on every site you build? On the Fact Sheets page, we can save approx. 85% of images’ file sizes without a noticeable loss of image quality. With approx. 1,300,000 annual page views…this makes for 5.2 The difference is approx. EUR 1000–1650 in costs (on one single page!).

Strategy 127

Strategy Development Energy Website 127

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 11, 2021

Assets Optimizations Brotli, AVIF, WebP, responsive images, AV1, adaptive media loding, video compression, web fonts, Google fonts. Run performance experiments and measure outcomes — both on mobile and on desktop (for example, with Google Analytics ). Adjust the argument depending on the group of stakeholders you are speaking to.

Performance 145

Performance Cache Media Metrics 145