Support for responsive images was added to WordPress core in version 4.4 to address the use case for viewport-based image selection, where the browser requests the image size that best fits the layout for its particular viewport.
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You can’t underestimate the importance of consistent, high-quality web design across devices of all shapes and sizes. Responsive web design is the way forward — but it’s often linked to performance issues. This is critical when 64% of smartphone users unforgivingly expect websites to load in under four seconds, yet average page weights continue to rise.
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Ask ten people what SEO is, and you’re likely to get ten different answers. Given the industry’s unsavoury past, this is hardly surprising. Keyword stuffing, gateway pages, and comment spam earned the first search engine optimisers a deservedly poor reputation within the web community.
Snake oil salesmen continue to peddle these harmful techniques to unsuspecting website owners today, perpetuating the myth that optimising your website for Google or Bing is an inherently nefarious practise. Needless to say, this is not true.
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The web is moving toward using HTTPS encryption by default. This move has been encouraged by Google, which announced that HTTPS would be a ranking signal. However, moving your website to HTTPS is good for other reasons, too.
Rather than debate those reasons, this article assumes you have already decided to move to HTTPS. We’ll walk through how to move your website to HTTPS, taking advantage of Varnish Cache.
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1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store and another 1.5 million in Google’s Play store. That’s a lot of apps, and for a growing number of mobile users. An average user in the US will download only three new apps per month (at best), according to comScore’s “US Mobile App Report.” Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough.
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Delivering a fast, smooth web experience is an important part of building websites today. Most of the time, we develop websites without understanding what the browser is actually doing under the hood. How exactly does the browser render our web pages from the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that we create? How can we use this knowledge to speed up the rendering of our web pages?
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Responsiveimages have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets.
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Recently, I had a project in which I needed to produce high-fidelity screens for a tablet. I was to present these screens on the device and also produce a clickable prototype. They needed to be pixel-perfect. The timeline was tight (as always), so I went with my go-to tool, Photoshop. I’ve been using it for over 10 years, and it gives me the fastest high-quality output.
Are you designing at “Retina” resolution in Photoshop? If the answer is yes, then this article is for you. I will walk you through the problems I faced in creating Retina mockups to be displayed on a tablet device. I will then explain a way to work that is easier and gives you better performance. This is about my experience with Photoshop, but it could be applied to Illustrator and other software.
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The @extend directive is nothing to fear, and it’s very versatile. Understanding how @extend works and keeping the guidelines above in mind will enable you to use @extend to its full advantage.
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I’m a firm believer that the best way to optimize for fast-loading mobile sites is to optimize for everyone. We don’t know when someone is on a non-mobile device but tethered to their phone, or just on awful Wi-Fi.
In a previous article for Smashing Magazine I explained how you can speed up your websites by serving dynamic pages from a reverse proxy like Varnish. If you are new to Varnish then that article is the place to start as I’ll be diving straight into configuration details here. In this article I’ll explain how you can benefit from using Varnish even when there are parts of your pages that can’t be cached for long periods, using Edge Side Includes.
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