Posts in the category: Optimization

In the last year or so there has been a trend of developers and agencies posting perfect Lighthouse scores on social channels. You’ve probably seen them, those 4 green circles, each with a 100 in the middle. This looks great, surely they’re doing a good job, but are they representative of the whole picture when it comes to performance testing the website in question? Or are they just the best test score achieved? Zach Leatherman...

If your website performance sucks it doesn’t matter how pretty the design is. It is essential that you understand how performance effects the conversion rates of your customers. It is imperative that you are able to identify if your website is slow and what to do about it. If you take away only one thing from this article please make sure it is this: Website performance should be your highest priority. UX (user experience), design,...

A very interesting article by Malte Ubl @cramforce (brought to my attention via the CSS Tricks newsletter) about the current state of optimising images on the web. There’s some really interesting concepts which I wasn’t aware of. Certainly worth a read for most front end developers I imagine. Article link here: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/image-optimizations/

Managing the images on your website is no longer as simple as uploading them with fixed dimensions and considering it a job well done. The web has evolved considerably and so has the way you should approach the implementation of images on your website. We can now make use of responsive image solutions with the img srcset tag, modern file formats like WebP, and content distribution networks (CDN’s). These approaches and services can be beneficial...

Having previously written about the benefits of using the WebP image format, I wanted to follow it up with some additional thoughts on improving page load times further with a technique called lazy loading. In the original gallery example I had 10 images with a combined size over 8MB and a rather appalling 40+ seconds page load on 3G. With WebP and some considered use of the img srcset attribute we brought that down to...

WebP as Google puts it is “a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.” If you undertake regular website testing you have probably also seen it recommend by Googles Page Speed Insights tool among others. I wanted to illustrate the difference it makes to our websites speed and bandwidth usage. Therefore I have created a couple of example pages to run tests on so we can understand...

It’s a distinct possibility that your website will receive more visitors over the coming weeks than it has previously due to current restrictions in the UK. So make sure your websites page speed is the best it can be, and give your users a good experience. You’ll also be maximising your potential sales and conversions. Mobile page speed is an important ranking factor, but so is your customers user experience. That experience may be a...

WordPress makes it easy for us to upload images to our websites, but I wonder how often we stop and consider the impact of these images. Your websites page load time is a key metric that isn’t going away anytime soon, and we’ve seen time and again that lowering it can improve conversions and other KPIs. Image choice and optimisation is an important consideration for the web. Images that are too large, badly optimised, or...

If you want to make sure your website is checking the right boxes when it comes to Google’s guidelines on SEO and Page Speed try checking out some of the helpful tools from Varvy – https://varvy.com/ It’s a really helpful indicator to see if you might need to make any improvements to your site. If you can follow the guidelines as best you can then you’re giving your website the best chance to perform well,...