Animated GIFs are popular on the web for good reason. They provide more engagement than an ordinary image, while remaining more digestible compared to a typical video. However GIFs are a terrible format for storing video and are often huge in size leading to slow page load times and high data usage. With HTML5 video, you can reduce the size of GIF content by up to 98% while still retaining the unique qualities of the GIF format in the browser. Today, Ayo Isaiah will show you how to convert animated GIFs to video files and examine how to properly embed these video files on the web so that they act just like a GIF would.
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The Server Timing header provides a discrete and convenient way to communicate backend server performance timings to developer tools in the browser. Adding timing information to your application enables you to monitor back-end and front-end performance all in one place. Over the years developer tools have been improved to help us troubleshoot these sorts of performance issues in the front end of our applications. Browsers now even have performance audits built right in. This can help track down front end issues, but these audits can show up another source of slowness that we can’t fix in the browser.
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Everyone knows that if a website is slow, users will abandon it. Many studies demonstrate the connection between website performance and conversion rates. Being an easy-to-use inclusive and versatile piece of software, WordPress comes with a plethora of options that are not necessarily utilized in each and every project. As a result, website performance can suffer. In this article, Denis Žoljom shares his experience and the basics of creating a decoupled WordPress.
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Since video files are large, optimizing the video to be as small as possible will lead to faster video delivery, speeding up video start, lowering the number of stalls, and minimizing the effect of the quality of the video delivered. Of course, we need to balance startup speed and stalling with the third metric of quality. In this series of posts on video performance on the web, Doug Sillars takes a closer look at how video is being used today, what we can learn from it, and how to move forward in a way that promotes fast delivery and playback of video content on the web.
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Video content on the web increases customer engagement and satisfaction. Pages that load quickly have the same effect. The addition of video to your website will slow down the page rendering time, necessitating a balance between overall page load and video content. In this aticle, Doug Sillars will examine the important metrics to balance performance and video playback on the web, look at how video is being used today, and provide best practices on delivering video on the web.
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While effective bundling of resources on the web has received a great deal of mindshare in recent times, how we ship front-end resources to our users has remained pretty much the same. The average weight of JavaScript and style resources that a website ships with is rising — even though build tooling to optimize the website has never been better. With the marketshare of evergreen browsers rising fast and browsers launching support for new features in lockstep, is it time we rethink asset delivery for the modern web? Today, Shubham Kanodia will give you some answers.
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In order for a product to succeed, designers should know their competition and collect as much data as possible. This data helps to create a solid product that users will actually want to use, rather than a product we want or imagine. Competitive analysis is one of the ways to get this data and to create a user-friendly product. No prior knowledge of the topic is needed because in this article, Mayur Kshirsagar will be explaining what the term means and how to perform a competitive analysis as you go.
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In Google’s never-ending journey to make the web a mobile-friendly place, we now have even greater insights into the four key reasons why consumers reach for their mobile devices. These are known as micro-moments, and this post aims to teach you how to design for micro-moments to increase website conversion rates.
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Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you the following pairing of talks from 2018 SmashingConfs, which will help you to assess the third party scripts you might be considering adding to a site. Taking into account business goals, user experience and performance you can make good decisions about what to include and how to do it.
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How can we design in a way to help visitors rather than frustrate them? How do we know that a great user experience is really working well? In this pairing of videos from 2018 SmashingConfs, we think about UX — from two very different angles.
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