#css interview questions 2018

[dodikawouk]

The Code Must Go On: An Afghan Coding Bootcamp Becomes a Lifeline Under Taliban Rule

Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine. 

In his hometown in Afghanistan’s northern Samangan province, the former computer science student started and ended each day glued to his laptop screen. 

Since late October, Asadullah had been participating in a virtual coding bootcamp organized by Code Weekend, a volunteer-run community of Afghan tech enthusiasts, with content donated by Scrimba, a Norwegian company that offers online programming workshops. 

On some days, Asadullah took a screen break for a game of pickup soccer, but generally he didn’t see his friends that much anymore. Under the Taliban regime, “old friends are getting so depressed,” he explains, and there was only so much of that he could handle. Instead, he tells me, “my life is on my computer.” 

Asadullah is one of the millions of young Afghans whose lives, and plans for the future, were turned upside down when the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan last August. When the capital fell, Asadullah had two semesters of college left, and he was thinking about his post-graduation plans. He wasn’t picky about his first job; anything that let him save up some money would do. But he had bigger plans: Asadullah wanted to start his own software company and share his love of computer science by teaching university and high school students. “When I start coding, I can forget everything,” he says.

Today, those plans are on pause—and no one knows for how long. The country’s economy is in free fall, the United Nations warns of famine, and in the meantime, Afghanistan’s new rulers have offered little by way of solutions to its citizens.

In such dire circumstances, a coding bootcamp—a remnant of a brief period of techno-optimism in Afghanistan—may seem out of place. But for its participants, it offers hope of a better future—though whether such a future is still possible in Afghanistan remains to be seen. 

Virtual learning 

When the Taliban swept into power in August, it was unclear what their rule would mean for the Internet in Afghanistan. Would they cut off Internet access? Use social media posts—or government databases—to identify and target their former enemies? Continue to wage their own increasingly effective public affairs campaigns?  

As it turned out, the Taliban did not cut off access to the Internet—at least it has not yet. Instead, for those Afghan students who can afford the Internet at home—especially women and girls, whom the regime has officially banned from secondary and higher education—online learning has become one of the primary sources of education. 

Some of this is well organized, with encrypted virtual classrooms set up by international supporters, while some is entirely self-directed—learning through YouTube videos, perhaps, or playlists of TED talks. And often it falls somewhere in between, making use of free or discounted online learning platforms. 

Afghan women attend a 2018 event. Photo courtesy Code Weekend.

Code Weekend’s virtual bootcamp falls into this latter category. Seventy-five participants were accepted into the cohort and are working their way through Scrimba’s Frontend Developer Career Path, a series of 13 interactive video learning modules that cover everything from HTML and CSS basics to tips on handling job interview questions about JavaScript or GitHub.

Participants can complete the modules on their own time and in their own homes, with Code Weekend volunteer mentors checking in weekly to answer questions, ensure that they stay on track, and assist with logistics as needed—including providing Internet top-up to keep participants online. According to organizers, roughly 50 members of the original cohort are active. 

Ensuring Internet connectivity is just one of the logistical and financial challenges of running a bootcamp, even a virtual one, in Afghanistan. Another is contending with power outages, which become more frequent every winter. In an attempt to solve both these problems, Code Weekend has been trying to crowdfund the costs of 3G credit and backup electricity through generators and battery storage units. 

But there’s another issue that worries organizers: “what the Taliban think,” says Jamshid Hashimi, the software engineer who started Code Weekend with friends seven years ago. The group doesn’t want to find out. “So far, we avoided interactions with them,” he says. 

In a way, the bootcamp’s virtual, asynchronous format helps Code Weekend stay under the radar. It makes it far easier for women, whose freedom of movement has been drastically curtailed under the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam, to participate without leaving their homes—or even interacting with male participants, which might also provoke the Taliban’s ire. 

Zarifa Sherzoy, 19, is one of the boot camp’s female participants. A recent high school graduate, she had hoped to be taking college entrance exams and starting university classes this semester, but instead, she and her seven siblings spend most of their days at home. Between household chores, power outages, and her limited access to the Internet, she spends just an hour or two on the coding bootcamp. But still, even this has provided a new structure and meaning to her days. “After the Taliban arrived,” she recalls being “very tired at home every day thinking about how to end this.” But since the coding bootcamp started in late October, she says, while her problems haven’t disappeared, “my days are good.” 

The virtual format has another added perk: it allows coders outside the Afghan capital, like Asad Asadullah, to participate.  

Code Weekend Bootcamp

Jamshid Hashimi at a 2015 event. Photo courtesy Code Weekend.

When Jamshid Hashimi, then a 23-year-old software architect at the homegrown Afghan tech company Netlinks, launched Code Weekend in June 2014 to bring together Afghan programmers, he was inspired by the techno-optimism that then permeated Kabul. 

A Fast Company profile on the country’s burgeoning startup scene, published in 2012, described the pervasive hopefulness this way: “Impossibly optimistic and totally obsessed, Afghanistan’s would-be tech moguls believe that computing will not only help them make money, but also secure peace in their land.” 

And it was not just tech companies that were hopeful. Code Weekend was part of a slew of initiatives that aimed to spur youth innovation, entrepreneurship, and, ultimately, engagement and leadership in building a more progressive Afghanistan—some funded by international donors with this express purpose. 

Other examples included the TEDxKabul program, which first came to Kabul with its “ideas worth spreading” (the TEDx tagline) in 2012, as well as other entrepreneurship-focused global franchises like Founder Institute-Kabul, which ran from 2014 to 2017. (Hashimi played a role in both of these programs, as did I, at different times.) By 2016, even Google had come to town,  launching Google for Entrepreneurs’ Startup Grind, a community for aspiring startup founders. 

But Code Weekend outlasted all of these initiatives, even after some of its own leadership team, including Hashimi, left Afghanistan. In the seven years since its founding, the volunteer-organized group has held around 100 in-person meetups at universities, incubators, and the offices of prominent Afghan technology companies.During the pandemic, like much of the rest of the world, it went virtual.  

Attendees met to learn everything from the basics of WordPress design and JavaScript languages to data collection tools for the field. (Afghanistan’s aid-driven economy had a big appetite for surveys and employed a number of ICT workers.) They  heard from local startups and engineering teams that came to introduce their new apps. They discussed books popular in the global tech community, like The Passionate Programmer (which Hashimi presented). And once, in an all-night event, open-source enthusiasts  came together to stream Laracon Online, the global conference for the open-source Laravel web development framework. 

Then, in 2019, after years of these mostly weekend events, Code Weekend decided to go bigger: the group launched an in-person coding bootcamp. The first cohort ran with a pilot program of 15 developers, 12 of whom graduated from the four-month program. A few, according to Hashimi, found jobs as a result of their participation. 

Elyas Afghan, 24, hopes to be one of them after he completes the bootcamp. Both of his older brothers are also in the field—one works for Rapid Iteration, Hashimi’s company—and partly as a result of their influence, he says, working with computers is all he’s ever wanted to do. More specifically, he hopes to find a job working for a global tech company.  

After the successful pilot, Code Weekend organizers planned for a second cohort, but the coronavirus slowed down their efforts. Then, in late August of last year, the Afghan government collapsed—but rather than ending their plans, this accelerated them. 

“Lots of dreams shattered when the government fell,” recalls Hashimi, who by then had relocated to Vancouver, Canada. Like many Afghans in the diaspora, he had a deep “urge to do something.” And what he settled on, he says, was continuing to help in the way that he knew best: supporting Afghan coders. “People need hope,” he said—and since earlier events focused on tech or innovation provided it, he hoped that a coding boot camp would do the same.

Hashimi’s goal for the bootcamp is to “provide a more sustainable way for Afghan youth to learn new and market-driven skills,” he wrote in our initial email correspondence,  and with those skills to “start earning an income for themselves and their families.”

For many of the bootcamp participants, all of whom share these goals, the potential for online work might be their only option. In 19-year-old Sherzoy’s family, only her father is currently employed—and what he makes is hardly enough to support her and her six siblings. After the bootcamp, she says, she hopes to “help my family and do something for my future.” She adds, “I do not want to be illiterate [uneducated].”

A Code Weekend participant works on an app at an event in 2018. Photo courtesy Code Weekend.

Thus far, however, most of the income opportunities are coming through Hashimi’s other efforts: in addition to Code Weekend, he also runs a software development company that employs or contracts with over 20 Afghan programmers, most of whom are still in Afghanistan, as well as an online freelancing platform, Yagan Kar (meaning “some work” in Dari), for Afghan freelancers. 

It’s an adjustment to his original, pre-Taliban plans. Even after Hashimi left Afghanistan in 2016 for a master’s degree in the UK in innovation management, he used to spend three or four months in his home country every year, supporting the burgeoning tech community. “My dream,” he says, was “having the largest software house in Afghanistan.” 

In a way, that’s still his goal. “I want to bring 1,000 jobs by 2023”  from outside the country, he says, which “would help a lot of freelancers and youths and developers and also the economy.” 

He says that “all Afghans want to leave,” but the reality is that the vast majority of them are ineligible for resettlement and evacuation efforts. They will remain in Afghanistan, and will need new sources of income. Hashimi sees the international tech community as a potential  provider of that income, through both remote and freelance work. 

But all of this will take time, and the country faces more urgent challenges. 

No government has officially recognized the new regime, and as a result, the international community has frozen the country’s bank accounts as well as previously scheduled deliveries of aid money, putting its already precarious economy on the brink of collapse and much of its population at risk of starvation. 

The economic challenge are exacerbated by violence, which has not stopped; the UN has documented a rise in extrajudicial reprisal killings against allies of the former government, while other violent extremist groups, like the local affiliate of the Islamic State, continue to terrorize civilians with suicide attacks. 

If things finally stabilize, muses Asad Asadullah, the former computer science student and bootcamp participant, Afghan employers—including maybe even the Taliban government—could one day hire Afghan developers as well. After all, he says, the Taliban “know the importance of technology, at least at senior levels.” 

With the bigger challenges facing Afghanistan, that day feels very far off—“maybe in three to four years,” Asadullah predicts. 

But he is not waiting around to see. In the four days between our first interview and our last WhatsApp messages confirming details for this story, he and his family fled to Pakistan, joining the 2.6 million Afghans who live as refugees outside of their homeland. 

Asadullah plans to stay in Pakistan until he can find an opportunity to go to Europe or the United States. In the meantime, he continues to order his day by when he can get online and code. 

from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/3z97hDM via IFTTT

[finderfox739]

Selenium Xpath Cheat Sheet

Selenium Xpath Cheat Sheet Pdf

Selenium Xpath Cheat Sheet

Selenium Testcase with Nose in Python; Agile Testing Interview Questions and Answers; 4 Mindset Principles That Will Help You Thrive In 2021 as QA/ Software Tester. Selenium Grid Tutorial For Beginners (Step By Step) The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on XPath in Python. In this page you will get some basic explanation about function, statement and steps to work with selenium webdriver. Load the webpage using chrome driver. Java selenium commands cheat sheet - Selenium Blog says: May 11, 2018 at 11:32 am Previous: Previous post: Execute Python Selenium tests in Selenium GridNext: Next post: Python selenium commands cheat sheet. CSS and XPath can both be used to denote locations in an XML document. These 2 syntaxes help guide your Selenium tests and allow automation to follow your well thought out test strategy. CSS is native to all browsers and specifically built for rendering in browsers, while XPath can give your Selenium test an exactness that is sometimes lacking.

CSS and XPath can both be used to denote locations in an XML document. These 2 syntaxes help guide your Selenium tests and allow automation to follow your well thought out test strategy. CSS is native to all browsers and specifically built for rendering in browsers, while XPath can give your Selenium test an exactness that is sometimes lacking in CSS. We put together a few tables to help translate XPath to CSS and vice versa. For browser testing, this translation can be especially effective for designers, developers and testers working together during the development and testing phase.

General:What It DoesXPathCSSAll HTML/htmlhtmlBody of Page/html/bodybodyElement box absolute reference/body/…/boxbody > … > .boxAny element matching boxboxboxAny element in the document**ID of an element(@id='green-background')#green-backgroundClass of an element(@class='Box').boxAny element matching title that is a descendant of boxbox//titlebox > titleAny element matching title that is a child of boxbox/ title.box .titleAny element matching title immediately preceded by box elementbox/following-sibling::*(1)/self::title.box + .titleImage element//imgimg

Selenium Xpath Cheat Sheet Pdf

PredicatesWhat It DoesXPathCSSSelects first child element/box/title(1).box .title:first-childSelects the last child element/box/title(last()).box .title:last-childSelects the second to last child element/box/title(last()-1).box .title:nth-last-child(2)

See Also

Selenium Xpath Cheat Sheet

Selenium Best Practices Selenium and Ruby

[subscriptlaw]

Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (Argument November 4, 2020)

Argument: November 4, 2020

Decision: TBD

Petitioner Brief: Sharon Fulton, et al.

Respondent Brief: City of Philadelphia, et al.

Lower Court: Third Circuit Court of Appeals

Catholic Foster Agency Seeks To Overturn Important Religious Freedom Precedent 

The City of Philadelphia is responsible for providing homes for children requiring foster care. These are children who have been removed from their homes because their parents are facing charges of abuse or neglect. 

A person wanting to become a foster parent must be approved by the City. Philadelphia contracts out the task of approving foster families to private organizations. The private organizations (“foster family care agencies”) interview family members, visit homes, and advise the City on whether a foster family should be licensed.

Catholic Social Services, A Foster Family Care Agency

Catholic Social Services (CSS) is a nonprofit organization which has contracted with Philadelphia as a foster family care agency for decades. The City describes that:

[CSS] has performed its contractual duties with distinction, helping DHS identify and approve hundreds of families to care for the City’s foster children. To this day, DHS continues to contract with CSS to provide a number of services to children in foster care, including managing group homes and directly providing social services to foster children. 

Accordingly, CSS has performed very well as a foster family care agency in Philadelphia. However, Philadelphia is not re-signing for foster services with the agency because CSS will not agree to the City’s new contract terms.

The Nondiscrimination Provision

In March 2018, a newspaper report highlighted that CSS would not work with same-sex couples. Despite that CSS had otherwise performed its responsibilities well, Philadelphia took issue with the organization’s stance against gay couples, deciding the policy is unacceptable discrimination.

CSS follows the Catholic Church teachings on marriage. As CSS explains, “That means, if ever asked, CSS could not provide a written endorsement of a same-sex relationship for a couple seeking to foster.”

A same-sex couple wishing to become a foster family must get licensed with a different agency. 

After the article came out, Philadelphia redrafted its contracts with foster family care agencies. The new contracts include an anti-discrimination provision requiring that a foster family care agency cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. If CSS can’t work with same-sex couples, it can’t act as a foster family care agency.

The Lawsuit: First Amendment Claims

CSS sued the City of Philadelphia with several First Amendment claims. The First Amendment bars the government from restricting a person’s speech or expression. It also prohibits the government from disfavoring a particular religion.

In the lawsuit, CSS claimed Philadelphia’s new anti-discrimination policy targets the Catholic organization because of its religious views. Further, the new anti-discrimination policy violates its freedom of speech and its freedom of expression because the policy forces the organization to approve of same-sex relationships, meaning it forces expression and speech contrary to the organization’s beliefs.

The City says the First Amendment was made for a case like this, where the government intends to restrict religious exercise because it does not agree with the religion’s views. 

Procedural History

CSS and the foster parent petitioners attempted to get preliminary relief in the district court, meaning they wanted the trial court to rule that they were likely to win the case. Preliminary relief would also put the City’s actions (i.e. new contract terms) on hold. However they lost. They appealed, and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the City again. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Philadelphia was not likely to win their claims and thus could not get preliminary relief. 

According to the Third Circuit, the City’s rule is valid because it applied generally and was neutral towards religion. Thus, in following Supreme Court precedent, Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the City had not violated the Free Exercise clause. Because the City had not set out to target the Petitioners but rather to promote a religiously-neutral policy against discrimination, it had not violated the Establishment Clause. 

The Third Circuit also denied CSS’s requests for relief for its other First Amendment claims. In sum, according to the Third Circuit, the City had the right to insist that CSS not discriminate against same-sex couples as a condition of working with it to provide foster services.

CSS and the foster parents appealed the Third Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court.

Issues on Appeal

Petitioners argue to the Supreme Court that the Third Circuit wrongly analyzed the Free Exercise claim. The Third Circuit evaluated whether the government would have allowed the same conduct by someone with a different religious view. Petitioners argue the Third Circuit should have used a broader set of evidence to determine whether a law is neutral and generally-applicable. 

Further, Petitioners argue that the relevant Free Exercise precedent, Employment Division v. Smith (1990), should be overturned. Smith ruled that the government is generally free to restrict religious liberty as long as the law is religiously neutral and generally applicable. Petitioners argue that rule is unworkable and fails to provide adequate Free Exercise protection.

Petitioners’ Arguments

Petitioners argue that Smith doesn’t apply to this case. And further, Smith should be overturned. Either way, the Third Circuit failed to protect the guarantees of the Free Exercise clause in applying Smith.

The Smith rule practically insulates a government action from a free exercise challenge if the government action was religiously-neutral and generally-applicable. But Petitioners argue that Smith doesn’t apply in this case. They argue that Philadelphia didn’t actually have an anti-discrimination law on the books that applied. Rather, according to CSS, Philadelphia determined its policy after deciding it disrespected CSS’s beliefs and then created a law—after the fact—to target the organization.

Philadelphia had no neutral law. Philadelphia decided on an outcome and then tried to find a law to fit. When it couldn’t, it reverse-engineered policies to justify its actions. This is the inverse of the neutral law in Smith. Philadelphia then compounded that error through express hostility toward CSS’s religious exercise.

Brief of Petitioners at 17.

Plus, CSS argues, Philadelphia allows all kinds of exemptions to its foster agency rules. Thus, the “law” isn’t generally applicable:

Nor did Philadelphia have a generally applicable law. A law cannot be generally applicable when it uses individualized exemptions, and Philadelphia has granted the Commissioner and the City’s lawyers carte blanche to give exemptions. But no such exemption will be granted for CSS’s religious exercise. 

Brief of Petitioners at 17.

Petitioners also argue that the Supreme Court should overturn Smith. They argue that Smith is not a workable standard and that it “is unsupported by the text, history, and tradition of the Free Exercise Clause—all of which guarantee broad protection for religious beliefs and practices.” Without Smith, individuals would be able to argue for strict scrutiny of government action that they claim violates their religious freedom. Petitioners claim that applying strict scrutiny in such a case would suit the commands of the First Amendment, whereas Smith does not.

Under strict scrutiny, Petitioner argue, this case would certainly fail because the government is compelling private speech:

Philadelphia requires private agencies, as a condition of providing foster care, to author a written document evaluating and endorsing same-sex and unmarried cohabitating relationships. There is no question that the endorsement is speech. It comes in the form of a home study written by CSS, which requires evaluations—both objective and subjective—of everything from the quality of the applicant’s intimate relationships to their suitability to raise children.

Brief of Petitioners, internal citations omitted.

Philadelphia cannot compel CSS to act against its religious beliefs Petitioners argue, and the Court must fix the precedent which resulted in the Third Circuit ruling. 

Respondents’ Arguments

Respondents argue that Philadelphia is not requiring CSS to do anything. CSS voluntarily acts as a foster care agency in agreeing to perform a responsibility that belongs to the government. CSS doesn’t have to participate, so the City is not requiring it to make any speech it doesn’t agree with. But it the agency does decide to work with the government, it must follow government rules—which means no discriminating against same-sex couples.

The government has “significantly greater leeway” when directing its employees and contractors than when regulating private individuals in its capacity as “sovereign.” That “extra power” stems both from the reality that government “could not function” if its agents had a constitutional right to perform their jobs as they see fit, and from the attenuated burden the government imposes on individual rights when it instructs its employees and contractors how to perform their official duties. 

Brief of Respondents, internal citations omitted.

Respondents argue under Smith that the anti-discrimination provision is religiously-neutral and generally-applicable. They argue against overturning Smith under stare decisis. They also argue that this case is not a good one to use for reconsidering the precedent because it comes within the government contracting context. In government contracting, Philadelphia argues, the government must be able to control its operations more than when it is controlling private action. If the Court wants to revisit Smith, it should find a case in which the government is controlling private action. Further, Philadelphia claims that its anti-discrimination actions would satisfy strict scrutiny anyway, which also means the case is not a good one to use for reconsidering Smith.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on November 4, 2020.

More Civil Rights Reports:

fromSubscript Law Blog | Subscript Lawhttps://https://ift.tt/3jgeb0k Subscript Law 4 Curtis Terrace Montclair NJ 07042 (201) 840-8182 https://ift.tt/2oX7jPi

[cultureessay541]

paper writing

About me

Purchase Apa Writing Assignments, Papers Writing In Britain

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[mercuria1-5pectre-blog]

New Start

Today I decided to start doing things that are relevant to my coding. Despite that I consider myself a genius, talent was only a 1% of success. Getting hands dirty now makes more sense that it used to. 

New Year is coming, so I am deciding to move on with my life. Setting new goals for life and for the upcoming year.

As for 2018 I have few things on my mind like : 

Music project, 

Apple and Amazon interview, 

Make a research on Artificial Intellegence,

Try to get in Netflix, 

Do something with hardware project, 

And work a little on Computer assistant(Jarvis).

Also, the BOOOOM of BLOCKCHAIN technology makes me research about it and find a way that it can change the way we communicate. Internet of data(information) => Internet of Things. 

Todays goal:

Go through questions about HTML, CSS, JS.

Go through Java Tutorial, 

Go through Equimper API dev

Sounds like a lot to do and a lot of fun . 

[nancydsmithus]

Smashing Podcast Episode 1 With Andy Clarke: What Is Art Direction?

Smashing Podcast Episode 1 With Andy Clarke: What Is Art Direction?

Drew McLellan

2019-11-05T14:30:59+02:002019-11-05T16:06:22+00:00

The new Smashing Podcast is the perfect way to take a little bit of Smashing along with you on your morning commute, when working out at the gym, or just washing the dishes. We’ll be bringing you a new interview with a Smashing expert every two weeks, directly to your podcast player of choice. You can subscribe in your favorite app to get new episodes as soon as they’re ready, or just listen using the player below.

To get things off with a bang, we’re launching the first two episodes today. Each episode will be accompanied by a post (just like this one) with a full transcription of the interview here on Smashing Magazine.

In this inaugural episode, Drew McLellan talks to designer, author, and speaker Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be applied to our web design projects? We dig into the topic and see if we can get to the bottom of things.

Show Notes

We discuss Art Direction for the Web, a new book by Andy Clarke.

Andy’s Inspired Design Decisions series of articles can be found on Smashing Magazine, and are available first with your Smashing Membership.

We found some examples of the art direction involved in the Boddingtons Cream of Manchester campaign discussed in the episode.

You can follow Andy on Twitter where he is @Malarky or via his website Stuff & Nonsense.

Transcript

Drew: He’s a well known designer, public speaker and author of numerous influential web design articles and books and has recently released his new book, Art Direction for the Web, with Smashing Magazine. Along with his wife, Sue, he founded and runs a web design studio, Stuff and Nonsense, in North Wales where he consults with companies big and small all around the world. You may know of his passion for gorillas but did you know that as a school child he was Junior National Bassoon Champion for three years in a row. My Smashing friends, it’s Andy Clarke. Andy, how are you today?

Andy Clarke: Eee, I’m smashing, lad.

Drew: So, as I mentioned your new book, Art Direction for the Web, is now available but obviously this isn’t your first book. Hard Boiled Web Design, that I’m sure people will know, and way back in the day, Transcending CSS. When did the idea for this particular book come about?

Andy Clarke: This was an interesting one because, like you say, this is number four in terms of books. Sue had always said that she’d hunt down and kill anybody that asked me to write another one because I am such a bastard when I’m writing books. I’m just not a nice person to be around and so I kind of didn’t ever want to do another, kind of, major book after Hard Boiled. So my original plan was actually to write three little, we called them shots in the whole, kind of Hard Boiled theme. Three kind of little 80 to 100 page, little shots. In the kind of the style of, or the length of, A Book Apart type length. Art Direction was going to be the first one and when I started to get into it which was way back at the beginning of, I think it the beginning of 2018 when I started it.

Andy Clarke: The more and more I kind of got into it, the more I realized that this, there was no way this was going to be a short book. All the things I wanted to talk about were just never going to fit. So I kind of threw the whole three shots idea out of the window and we just concentrated on doing this one. So I suppose the idea for this one came actually quite a few years ago even before a lot of the stuff that I talk about in the book in terms of what we can do with design and what we can do with CSS and all that kind of stuff was even a possibility. But it’s been a long time coming this one, I think it’s the kind of spiritual successor to some of the other stuff that I’ve done in the past. That sounds a bit grandiose, doesn’t it?

Drew: No, not at all. I mean, like many people, I’ve come into this field of building stuff for the web without any real formal background in, well, I’m a developer. I don’t really have a formal background in programming. I’ve just sort of picked it up as I go along and I certainly don’t have a formal background in anything to do with design. I’m not really familiar with the terminology and the concepts and the, a formal training would instill, particularly in design. So for people like me, when we talk about art direction, what exactly is art direction?

Andy Clarke: That’s an almost impossible question to answer because it means so many kind of different things at different levels. But I’m going to give an example. Do you remember back in, I mean we’re talking 15-odd years ago now but do you remember the adverts? In fact, for the show notes I’ll send you some links. But do you remember, there was an ad campaign called “The Cream of Manchester” for Boddingtons Beer. One of the things that they did, there was some really funny TV commercials but one of the things that they did incredibly successfully was a whole series of graphics which went on posters and various other things which were a glass of Boddingtons beer with the incredibly creamy head, which was the most important part of Boddingtons Beer and they shaped the head into all kinds of different things. So it looked like an ice cream and it looked like a quiff and it looked like all kinds of stuff. And what that did was it told the story of what was important about Boddingtons Beer through the medium of design. So it didn’t necessarily just say Boddingtons has a very creamy head. What it did was it showed you that through the visuals but then with the, in combination with the words, you got this very, very clever idea about what Boddingtons Beer was all about. And that, in one level, is art direction.

Andy Clarke: Let me give you another example. I can’t remember which magazine it was, now it might have been Rolling Stone. I can’t remember exactly which magazine cover it was now but a couple of years ago there was a very famous magazine cover and it was a picture of Donald Trump and they’d taken the barcode which normally sits in the bottom left or bottom right hand corner of the cover of the magazine and they’d put it on his top lip and made him look like Hitler. That’s art direction. That’s using design to convey a message to tell a story, to communicate something to an audience but through design.

Andy Clarke: And when we think about applying those things to the web, it is exactly the same kind of purpose but what we’re doing is we’re using all of those aspects of design. We’re using a layout. We’re using typography. We’re using color choices. We’re using all of these kind of design ingredients to do whatever it is that we’re trying to do online. So we might be telling a story of…a story through an editorial magazine or a news story or we might be telling a story about why you should buy my brand of power drill rather than somebody else’s brand of power drill. And it extends even into user experience because we’re really thinking about what is somebody feeling at this point? How do we communicate with them? How do we try and cheer them up, try and cool down. Do we want to be kind of quirky and delightful or do we want to be sort of more serious and conservative. And all of those aspects of evoking an emotional response in somebody is art direction.

Drew: Like accessibility, we often say that that really is the responsibility of everyone in the team but then in practice there tends to be an accessibility expert who really knows their stuff and can sort of help everyone review their work and push things forward. Is it the same with art direction? Is it something that everybody in a team should be looking at? Or is it something you hire in a big bright art director like yourself to come in and tell everyone what they should be doing?

Andy Clarke: No, it is exactly the sort of thing that everybody should be paying attention to. Every decision that we make in terms of design is an opportunity to tell a story. And that can be a big story or it can be a tiny story. And even things, for example, the style and the wording of microcopy can help to tell the story. Now, what we really need is not just everybody kind of paying attention to what that message is but we also need to know what the message is to begin with.

Andy Clarke: And one of the things that I think has been lacking over the last however many years when we’ve been kind of evolving the web as a medium is we’ve kind of moved away from this idea of the web as either a kind of creative medium or as a great medium for storytelling. And that’s the kind of thing if you go to an ad agency, then you’re not going to walk far through the door before you fall over an art director. But that’s not something that you generally find, it’s not a job title that tends to happen at digital agencies. It’s just, you’ll find UX people and project managers and developers and all manner of different, in parentheses, product designers. But the overall thinking about what message are we trying to convey, how do we implement that through design? But then there’s that kind of, what you would think of as creative direction but it is slightly different. Where somebody is basically just checking that everything is on brand, is on message, is part of telling that story.

Drew: As a developer, if I want to start getting involved in the art direction of my projects, where on earth do I start? Is this something that I can learn or do you have to be born this way?

Andy Clarke: I can’t think about the way you were born. You’ve landed on your head. No, it is something that can be taught and it is something which takes practice. So you don’t need to have gone to art school or studied advertising or whatever. I never did. I didn’t even do a graphic design degree back in the ‘80s. I was a failed painter. But it’s the kind of thing where, I think it’s a change of kind of, mindset a little bit. In thinking about, it’s not just about the practical aspects of designing a website but it’s also the thinking about, “Well, what are we trying to do?”

Andy Clarke: So let me give you an example, right. So Smashing Magazine, I did some early conceptual work with them for the redesign that we see right now. And the way that we did that was to basically just host a bunch of workshops where we all got together and we sat around a big table for a week and we did this kind of three or four times where really what we were trying to do was to get to the bottom of what the Smashing message was. And how Smashing wanted to be perceived and that was basically a great big roundtable exercise which was basically designed to just get the Smashing guys, Vitaly and Markus and others, thinking about what the real purpose of Smashing was and how they were going use design to communicate the unique kind of personality and attributes of Smashing.

Andy Clarke: And to help that along, we did a load of, kind of early rough design stuff. And then from what they learnt, they then turned to Dan Mall and said, “Right, we’ve got these words, we’ve got these, call them design principles if you like, that we want to then pull out through the design. We want to be bright and bold. We want the experience turned up to eleven. We want to be quirky” and all these kind of words that had come out of our early design discussions. And then he would then produce designs that sort of fitted with that brief.

Andy Clarke: And the interesting thing about that if we relate this back to your question where you’re saying “Where do I get involved?”, it’s, is, if we were kicking off a project for Notist, for example. The very obvious thing is that it does some things. It hosts your slide decks. It adds your speaker profile or whatever but those are just, they’re the things that it does. But your aspirations for that product are much, much more than just the bunch of practical things that it does. So from a brand and from an art direction point of view, yes, you want to be designing a product which is streamlined and simple to use and reliable and all of the stuff that it, kind of goes with it. But there’s a bigger picture and I would be speaking to you about what that purpose really is. Is it to inspire other speakers to get onstage? Is it to share information more widely? Is it to make talks that happen at remote conferences much, much more visible to people wherever they are in the world. There’s obviously a bigger thing going on in here.

Andy Clarke: And then once we’ve kind of understood what those real, kind of, what our real purpose was, then we can think about how do we convey that message through the design. And that’s where a designer would come in with a creative brief and then we would look at, well, what typography style is going to convey that message? What kind of layout? What kind of color scheme? What kind of graphics are going to really tell that story because you can easily just say the world’s most popular slide deck sharing site as, what’s that nasty one? Not Speaker Deck, the other one. SlideShare. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. What we would look to do is something like Notist if we consider an art direction point of view is to consider, how do you want people to feel when you’re using the product and how do you want them to feel when they’re making the decision to choose your product over somebody else’s. And that’s essentially what it boils down to.

Drew: So it’s very much about how the brand, in a sense, is embodied in every little detail and every part of the design, both the sort of visual design and the functional design. Would that be accurate to say?

Andy Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and that should be the case with anything that we’re making. It’s why I get so disappointed when I see stuff which is not a gajillion miles away from framework default in terms of layout or button styles or type hierarchy or whatever it happens to be, all of these kind of design things. Because, to me that’s like completely missing the point of the design. Yeah, it might be a functional thing to use but does that make it nice?

Drew: So obviously modern websites are mostly spat out of a CMS into identical templates. So if kind of one of the jobs of art direction is to invoke this sort of emotional response to something on a page, can that be done through spitting out content into templates or can it be done by machine?

Andy Clarke: Well, if I had the solution to that problem, I’d be a very rich man because it is actually the problem that a massive amount of the web is struggling with. Whether it would be news outlets or magazine outlets or editorial or whatever. And it’s a question which comes up again and again and again. And actually the people that have really solved this problem best of all that I took to my knowledge it ProPublica who I talk quite a lot about in the book. And our old friend Rob Weychert basically designed the CMS implementation for ProPublica. And the way that they did it was that they said, “Right, okay, these are our foundations style, this is what the ProPublica website looks like and an article on that website looks like if I do nothing. This is what it is.” But obviously they want to be able to customize that in all kind of different ways whether it would be type or layout or color theme or anything else. What they did was very simply they just had a field in the CMS that they could inject custom CSS. And because they understood the cascade and they understood how CSS builds they would only then be able to overwrite certain things.

Andy Clarke: Now, not everybody’s going to want to go to the extent of custom designing articles in the way that ProPublica do. And they don’t art direct or over design everything. It is only these really kind of special pieces that they tend to do a really great art direction job on. But there are ways in which we can do this. One of the great, we always talk about separation of, or we used to talk about, it used to be the thing where we would separate content and structure and style and behavior. Now it seems like everybody piles everything into JavaScript but moving swiftly on. One of the things that you can do, is you can separate out the CSS logic. And as long as you don’t bake in the style of the page into the HTML, as long as you keep things flexible, you can then do an enormous amount, particularly when we’ve got things like CSS grid, flex box, which are kind of, almost like content independent in a way, and CSS variables.

Andy Clarke: So I’m working on site with a French football magazine which will hopefully be finished by the time this podcast goes out and that’s a question that we’re trying to solve right now. So what I’ve done over the last couple of weeks is I’ve designed probably about half a dozen different layout templates. Now, some pages are fixed. They’re never going to change, they’re never going to be wildly different. If you think about something like a league table or a list of results from a football Saturday then you’re not going to do an enormous amount with it. But when it comes to things like player profiles and team profiles and some of the more, kind of, involved content, what I’ve done is I’ve designed about half a dozen different layout combinations. All based on exactly the same CSS. And what I’m doing is I’m then extracting out certain things that, for want of a better word I’m calling themes. Just in terms of right, in this design, Design A, and I give them all names. I give, I’ve given the theme, I’ve named them after French football players. So if you want to, if you look at the Cantona design or Cantona theme, what do the headlines look like? What do the block quotes look like? What do the table headers look like? What do the buttons look like? There’s a specific style that goes into that theme which is independent of the layouts.

Andy Clarke: And the other thing which is independent of that theme is the six different color schemes that I’ve come up with. So basically by the end of the project, you’ll have a color layer, a theme layer and a layout layer that they are able then to kind of pick and choose. And that can be automated, it can be turned into toggle switches in the CMS or whatever it might happen to be. So there are ways of doing that.

Andy Clarke: Now that’s not a particularly kind of appropriate thing for, in terms of pure art direction but the same mechanics can then be used if we want to be saying right, “Well, we do want to customize this so let’s introduce these new fields.”

Drew: One of the examples in the book, quite early on of a, sort of art directed site is the UK government’s gov.uk site, which is excellent as a user of it. It’s a site I really enjoy using it but it’s not one that I would immediately think of as being art directed, in inverted commas. It’s not very visually rich. It’s quite sparse and not sparse in a minimalist way but sparse in a utilitarian way. Art direction doesn’t need to be flashy, I’m taking from that?

Andy Clarke: Well, I have spent years joking about gov.uk and I’ve always thought of gov.uk as being the website that design forgot. I’ve often said gov.uk, not known for its creative flair. And it was interesting, when I was doing a series of podcast interviews for the book, I was talking to Mark Porter, who used to be creative director at the Guardian. You can’t read a book about editorial design without Mark cropping up at some point. In fact, he’d be a great person for you to speak to on this podcast at some point to get a different perspective. And I was saying to Mark in our conversation, “Look, I can remember great art directed ad campaigns on TV, in magazines. We’ve talked about art direction in newspapers and print publications, etcetera, give me an example of what you think is great art direction on the web.” And I was absolutely stunned when Mark said, “Gov.uk.”

Andy Clarke: And it took a while to sink in but actually he was absolutely right because if art direction is about making people feel in a certain way then gov.uk does its job incredibly well. It doesn’t need to be flashy. It doesn’t need to be overly designed. It doesn’t need to push boundaries or do any of these things that you might associate with newfangled CSS grid webby stuff because it does what it does and it’s, the design is absolutely appropriate to, not only to the audience and what they want to do but also how gov.uk want people to feel when they’ve left the site. When you’ve gone on there and paid your car tax or looked up when your bin collection’s going to be or whether it’s safe to travel to Cameroon or…I leave that site reassured that I’ve been given the information that I was looking for in a thorough and professional way. I don’t think to myself, “Oh, is that site trustworthy?” And not just because its gov.uk but because the whole experience has just been designed to leave no unanswered questions in my brain.

Drew: Yes, it’s so, sort of simple. It gives you real confidence in the information you’ve found is correct or the process that you followed, there’s a very clear way through it so you feel like, “Yes, I’ve completed that successfully because it was unambiguous.”

Andy Clarke: Now, would I design certain things differently? You can bet your bottom dollar I would but would I want to think about improving typography? Yes. Would I want to get more granular in terms of typographic design so that we can improve the way that numerals look or dates look or tables of data look or whatever? Yes, absolutely there’s some things that I would look at there and say, “I want to improve the design of that aspect of gov.uk.” But in terms of the art direction, no, everything that they, that you see whether it’s intention or not in terms of, I don’t know whether there is an art director at gov.uk, but everything that you see just contributes to how people feel at the end of the experience and that’s good art direction.

Drew: The book itself is really beautiful. I’d seen the ebook version of it early on which is absolutely terrific and I recommend that. But then I had the pleasure of picking up an actual printed version and I really recommend the printed version even more. It’s, every sort of spread is as you’d expect, sort of custom designed and it’s just jampacked with loads of inspirational examples. And it’s so heavily illustrated, I mean there’s hardly a double page spread that’s all text. It’s all illustrated with stuff. It’s really great. To be honest, it’s not the sort of book, not knowing anything about art direction before our conversation, and before looking at, actually looking at the book. It’s something I wouldn’t have picked up thinking it was for me but once I started looking through it, I thought, “Yeah, this is really good.” Obviously, you’ve designed it, you’ve designed every spread by hand. What was that process like?

Andy Clarke: It was a lot of work. I mean, first of all, I just want to say an enormous thank you to my son, Alex, who actually typeset that entire book from start to finish. What we wanted to do when we set out to produce the book was to show off some inspiring stuff but we also wanted it to be incredibly relevant to people at various different stages or different areas or whatever. And Sue would be quite, sort of brutal with me and say, “Don’t forget to explain it this way. If somebody’s using Squarespace or Shopify or Bootstrap Grid or whatever, then you need to talk to those people as well.” So what I did was, I actually spent about three months designing a whole ton of different examples. And me being me, I had to kind of, everything had to be perfect. There had to be a theme so I kind of came up with this hard boiled based London gangster theme for an app and a website that kind of goes with it. And then everything kind of just spread on from there. What was interesting in terms of the actual design of all those examples was what you learn how to design in one part of the book you then learn how to build in another part of the book. So there is this kind of balance to it.

Andy Clarke: But then, so basically what would happen is, was that I came up with about half a dozen different layout scamps for the main body of the book. I was much, much more detailed on the, sort of the examples I didn’t design, some of the other examples from elsewhere on the web. But the general body of the book, I just did half a dozen, kind of just very simple box layout sketches. Alex would then interpret that and chapter by chapter we would then go through it. So literally every single page has been tweaked. And I haven’t done, I’ve never done a book that’s got, had that much attention to detail.

Drew: Yeah, it really shows and the end result is fantastic and I’ve been learning a lot from it. So something I always like to ask people. I’ve been learning about art direction, what have you been learning about lately? Is there anything in particular in your work and your projects that you’ve been learning and swatting up on?

Andy Clarke: Yeah. I’ve been really trying to get to grips with more advanced grid stuff. That’s something which I’ve been really trying to sort of push the boundaries of. And along with this kind of, because I’ve been experimenting with, “Here’s a great, here’s a quirky layout. How would we build that?” And along the way comes things like SVGs and making SVGs responsive and I actually learnt today that you can’t use the picture element with inline SVG. You have to use an IMG element if you want to swap one picture for another or one source for another in HTML. So my main, I’ve actually been going back to really just learn a hell of a lot more about code. I think that quite, you go through phases where there’s a huge amount to learn or it seems that way and there’s something new that you want to get to grips with. And then things kind of plateau out and you churn through the same stuff or you use the same patterns or the same kind of methodology for awhile and then there’s another spike. And I’m kind of in one of those spikes at the moment.

Drew: Obviously the book is available now. You’ve also been writing a series of articles for Smashing Magazine around some of the same sort of ideas, picking out some bits and bobs which we’ll link to in the show notes. But you’re also doing a webinar series, is that right?

Andy Clarke: Yeah, well, the articles in the webinar is all the same stuff so I called it Inspired Design Decisions. And it came about because I was actually in Magma Book Shop, which is a brilliant magazine book shop in London, before Christmas. I was with our friend, Al Power, and we were kind of thumbing through magazines and I was geeking out and going, “Oh, look at this beautiful quote. That layout looks amazing. Coo, I love the way that they’ve tied this image with the color of the text and blah, blah, blah.” And Al said, “Well, I’ve never really thought a bit like that. I’ve never really thought about lessons that we can learn from editorial design or magazine design or other things. And you just talk about it in ways that just make sense. You ought to write about this stuff.” So I don’t want to write another book at the moment because well, Sue would hunt down and kill anybody that asked me to. So the idea came about was, well, why not do a series of articles over the course of the year where I would touch on a particular topic and a particular piece of inspiration.

Andy Clarke: There’s three gone out now, so far. There’ll be four, maybe five by the time this podcast goes out. Each one is the webinar content with Q&A. Everybody that is a Smashing member also gets access to a really, really nicely designed PDF version of all of the articles and all the code that goes with it. And then what we do a month later is we’ll put that article out for free on the public Smashing Magazine website. And what we’ll do sometime next May, is we’ll collect all of those twelve articles together and we’ll re-edit them and get the continuity right and that’ll be another book that comes out, probably next April, May time.

Drew: That sounds great.

Andy Clarke: It’s a lot of fun.

Drew: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Andy, you can follow him on Twitter where he is @Malarkey and find examples of his work and hire him via his website, stuffandnonsense.co.uk. Art Direction for the Web is available now through Smashing at smashingmagazine.com/books and I commend it to you. Andy, do you have any parting words?

Andy Clarke: (Beep) to Brexit.

(dm, ra, il)

[localbizlift]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[theh0ustonplacestobe]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company’s website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers — basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm,” we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you’re using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It’s an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you’ll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don’t include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn’t have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href=”frontpage-sm.css” rel=”stylesheet” media=”(min-width: 767px)”>

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you’ll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare’s configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

[deannanaylor]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company’s website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers – basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm,“ we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you’re using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It’s an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you’ll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don’t include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn’t have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css” rel=“stylesheet” media=“(min-width: 767px)”>

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you’ll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare’s configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed published first on http://goproski.com/

[wellnessandrelief18]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2IDwhLr WallStreetOasis.com

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2v7MGPW April 14, 2019 at 05:03PM Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog

[ryangonzales928]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[onlineinvesting18]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[goproski]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[eduardokingsley89]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[greenmelonmarketing]

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.

Ready? Let’s dig in.

5 Steps to speed up the backend

Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article

Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured

This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most critical and fastest layer of cache and serves the majority of the anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish caches the whole page in memory, so returning it to the visitor is lightning fast.

Step 2: Extend the TTL of that cache

If you have a large database of content (specifically in the 10,000+ URL range) that doesn’t change very frequently, to drive the hit-rate higher on the Varnish caching layer, you can extend the time to live (TTL basically means how long before you flush the object out of the cache).

For WSO, we went all the way up to two weeks (since we were over 300,000 discussions). At any given time, only a few thousand of those forum URLs are active, so it makes sense to heavily cache the other pages. The downside to this is that when you make any sitewide, template or design changes, you have to wait two weeks for it to arrive across all URLs.

Step 3: Warm up the cache

In order to keep our cache “warm," we have a specific process that hits all the URLs in our sitemap. This increases the likelihood of a page being in the cache when a user or Google bot visits those same pages (i.e. our hit rate improves). It also keeps Varnish full of more objects, ready to be accessed quickly.

As you can see from the chart below, the ratio of “cache hits” (green) to total hits (blue+green) is over 93 percent.

Step 4: Tune your database and focus on the slowest queries

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. Make sure you enable the slow queries report and check it at least every quarter. Check the slowest queries using EXPLAIN. Add indexes where needed and rewrite queries that can be optimized.

On WSO, we use a MySQL database. To tune MySQL, you can use the following scripts: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl and https://github.com/mattiabasone/tuning-primer

Step 5: HTTP headers

Use HTTP2 server push to send resources to the page before they are requested. Just make sure you test which ones should be pushed, first. JavaScript was a good option for us. You can read more about it here.

Here is an example of server push from our Investment Banking Interview Questions URL:

</files/advagg_js/js__rh8tGyQUC6fPazMoP4YI4X0Fze99Pspus1iL4Am3Nr4__k2v047sfief4SoufV5rlyaT9V0CevRW-VsgHZa2KUGc__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__TLh0q7OGWS6tv88FccFskwgFrZI9p53uJYwc6wv-a3o__kueGth7dEBcGqUVEib_yvaCzx99rTtEVqb1UaLaylA4__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,</files/advagg_js/js__sMVR1us69-sSXhuhQWNXRyjueOEy4FQRK7nr6zzAswY__O9Dxl50YCBWD3WksvdK42k5GXABvKifJooNDTlCQgDw__TDoTqiqOgPXBrBhVJKZ4CapJRLlJ1LTahU_1ivB9XtQ.js>; rel=preload; as=script,

Be sure you're using the correct format. If it is a script: <url>; rel=preload; as=script,

If it is a CSS file: <url>; rel=preload; as=style,

7 Steps to speed up the frontend

The following steps are to help speed up your frontend application. The front-end is the part of a website or application that the user directly interacts with. For example, this includes fonts, drop-down menus, buttons, transitions, sliders, forms, etc.

Step 1: Modify the placement of your JavaScript

Modifying the placement of your JavaScript is probably one of the hardest changes because you will need to continually test to make sure it doesn’t break the functionality of your site. 

I’ve noticed that every time I remove JavaScript, I see page speed improve. I suggest removing as much Javascript as you can. You can minify the necessary JavaScript you do need. You can also combine your JavaScript files but use multiple bundles.

Always try to move JavaScript to the bottom of the page or inline. You can also defer or use the async attribute where possible to guarantee you are not rendering blocking. You can read more about moving JavaScript here.

Step 2: Optimize your images

Use WebP for images when possible (Cloudflare, a CDN, does this for you automatically — I’ll touch more on Cloudflare below). It's an image formatting that uses both Lossy compression and lossless compression.

Always use images with the correct size. For example, if you have an image that is displayed in a 2” x 2 ” square on your site, don’t use a large 10” x 10” image. If you have an image that is bigger than is needed, you are transferring more data through the network and the browser has to resize the image for you

Use lazy load to avoid/delay downloading images that are further down the page and not on the visible part of the screen.

Step 3: Optimize your CSS

You want to make sure your CSS is inline. Online tools like this one can help you find the critical CSS to be inlined and will solve the render blocking. Bonus: you'll keep the cache benefit of having separate files.

Make sure to minify your CSS files (we use AdVagg since we are on the Drupal CMS, but there are many options for this depending on your site).  

Try using less CSS. For instance, if you have certain CSS classes that are only used on your homepage, don't include them on other pages. 

Always combine the CSS files but use multiple bundles. You can read more about this step here.

Move your media queries to specific files so the browser doesn't have to load them before rendering the page. For example: <link href="frontpage-sm.css" rel="stylesheet" media="(min-width: 767px)">

If you’d like more info on how to optimize your CSS, check out Patrick Sexton’s interesting post.

Step 4: Lighten your web fonts (they can be HEAVY)

This is where your developers may get in an argument with your designers if you’re not careful. Everyone wants to look at a beautifully designed website, but if you’re not careful about how you bring this design live, it can cause major unintended speed issues. Here are some tips on how to put your fonts on a diet:

Use inline svg for icon fonts (like font awesome). This way you'll reduce the critical chain path and will avoid empty content when the page is first loaded.

Use fontello to generate the font files. This way, you can include only the glyphs you actually use which leads to smaller files and faster page speed.

If you are going to use web fonts, check if you need all the glyphs defined in the font file. If you don’t need Japanese or Arabic characters, for example, see if there is a version with only the characters you need.

Use Unicode range to select the glyphs you need.

Use woff2 when possible as it is already compressed.

This article is a great resource on web font optimization.

Here is the difference we measured when using optimized fonts:

After reducing our font files from 131kb to 41kb and removing one external resource (useproof), the fully loaded time on our test page dropped all the way from 5.1 to 2.8 seconds. That’s a 44 percent improvement and is sure to make Google smile (see below).

Here’s the 44 percent improvement.

Step 5: Move external resources

When possible, move external resources to your server so you can control expire headers (this will instruct the browsers to cache the resource for longer). For example, we moved our Facebook Pixel to our server and cached it for 14 days. This means you’ll be responsible to check updates from time to time, but it can improve your page speed score.

For example, on our Private Equity Interview Questions page it is possible to see how the fbevents.js file is being loaded from our server and the cache control http header is set to 14 days (1209600 seconds)

cache-control: public, max-age=1209600

Step 6: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

What’s a CDN? Click here to learn more.

I recommend using Cloudflare as it makes a lot of tasks much easier and faster than if you were to try and do them on your own server. Here is what we specifically did on Cloudflare's configuration:

Speed

Auto-minify, check all

Under Polish

Enable Brotoli

Enable Mirage

Choose Lossy

Check WebP

Network

Enable HTTP/2 – You can read more about this topic here

No browsers currently support HTTP/2 over an unencrypted connection. For practical purposes, this means that your website must be served over HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2. Cloudflare has a free and easy way to enable HTTPS. Check it out here.

Crypto

Under SSL

Choose Flexible

Under TLS 1.3

Choose Enable+0RTT – More about this topic here.

Step 7: Use service workers

Service workers give the site owner and developers some interesting options (like push notifications), but in terms of performance, we’re most excited about how these workers can help us build a smarter caching system.

To learn how to to get service workers up and running on your site, visit this page.

With resources (images, CSS, javascript, fonts, etc) being cached by a service worker, returning visitors will often be served much faster than if there was no worker at all.

Testing, tools, and takeaways

For each change you make to try and improve speed, you can use the following tools to monitor the impact of the change and make sure you are on the right path:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Google Page Speed Insights was updated on November 2018 (Details here). It gives you an incredible number of suggestions on how to improve the page performance for mobile and desktop based on Light House.

We know there is a lot to digest and a lot of resources linked above, but if you are tight on time, you can just start with Step 1 from both the Backend and Front-End sections. These 2 steps alone can make a major difference on their own.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I’ll make sure João Guilherme, my Head of Technology, is on to answer any questions for the community at least once a day for the first week this is published.

Happy Tuning!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!