Google launched its ‘Learn Performance’ course. The course is designed for those new to web performance. It covers key web performance concepts and techniques for improving performance. At least… that is what the label says. Not SEO related? It tells you that website performance is about retaining users, improving conversions and improving the overall user experience. The relationship between performance and business outcomes is clear. It is remarkable, and typical for Google, to not sa...| Usecue web development
I build a lot of Hugo websites. Currently we are (re)building 8 different websites. If you look at the BuiltWith list for Hugo websites from our region in the Netherlands, you will find 2 websites that we have built: aadprins.nl and search.nl. It is funny to see your own websites in website lists. Especially the Aad Prins project, because it is based on our recently launched open-source Hugo theme called ‘Hugobricks’.| Usecue web development
Before 2015 I was building WordPress websites. Some things in WordPress I really liked. One of them was the image resizing. When I switched to Jekyll in 2015 I found out that I could no longer resize images automatically. Fortunately, I found images.weserv.nl, a Dutch image resizing service. This service was smarter than WordPress. It resized your images on the fly and kept it in their cache for 30 days. An excellent strategy.| Hugo Codex
No, this is not about lazy loading. We are talking about image compression only, as images are an important part of your page load (20% on average). Every byte counts when you want to get a 100% Google Lighthouse Score. I was happy to find that Boris Smus did some great ground work on this topic, suggesting that a ‘highly compressed 2x image is smaller in size and looks better than the uncompressed 1x image’.| Hugo Codex
Good websites load instantly. Almost everybody who wants a faster loading website uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This is a network of servers, distrubuted around the world, where every websites is available on every server. What does a CDN do? A CDN does two things: it caches your files/requests (make them static and keep them in memory) and it serves them from a server near your geographical location. This should normally save time.| Usecue web development
The following text is a Twitter thread from Thomas Fuchs. Every web developer should have read this. He posted it in November 2017 and it becomes more valuable every year. Chris Ferdinandy even wrote a whole book about it. Thomas ended the thread with the title of this post: ‘Long live the lean web’. It’s a weird dichotomy: the more capable underlying web tech gets (CSS features, HTML canvas, etc.) the more larger and more complex frameworks on top of it become.| Usecue web development
In the beginning Jamstack was fun. The main SSG was Jekyll, which was simple and open-source. It was not only free to use, but also free to host (on Github). Jamstack websites were blazing fast and scored high in Google Lighthouse. There were plenty of free CMS options to choose from. The Jamstack looked very promising! But times have changed… Jekyll is dead Sure… you can still use Jekyll. But Jekyll lost its most important developer and Github decided to freeze their Jekyll version.| Usecue web development
As far as I know there is only one other business that is also good at getting a perfect Lighthouse Score: Delete Agency. At the beginning of 2018 they challenged themselves to get a 100% score on their own website, but without changing how the site looked or functioned… and they succeeded! Optimizing everything They optimized their website in every way possible. They created the following checklist: use small Javascript files tree shaking code splitting use ES2015 modules preload and prefe...| Usecue web development
Envato is filled with very popular multi-purpose themes. The popular ones are sold almost a million times. You can virtually build any site with these themes without writing a single line of code. They offer a variety of different pre-made layouts. They seem like value for money… but there is a catch. High maintenance costs Multi-purpose themes (often) have no strict separation between content and design, which means that your client can ruin your carefully created design.| Usecue web development
What is the ‘Google score’ in your portfolio exactly, you ask? The short answer is: it is a measurement from Google, that indicates the quality of a website. To generate this score Google renders the website in Chrome. While doing so, Google analyzes the code and performance of your website in a series of audits. These audits are seperated into four categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. Each category scores between 0 and 100, where 100 is the best and 0 is the wo...| Usecue web development