Conferences over Zoom are just nowhere near as engaging as live events. From conversations in the hallway over coffee to meeting new people, to the drinks receptions and the flexibility to move around at an event, there are so many more opportunities to exchange ideas with people when you meet in person. While turnout numbers at conferences are not currently as high as they were pre-COVID, this conference for me marked a turning point - it feels like we are finally returning back to some sort of normality ..read more

Introduction User scripts were first available with Greasemonkey, originally as an extension for Firefox. They have never really become mainstream but they can fill a very useful role in quickly prototyping enhancements and fixing annoyances in many websites. There are some great examples that people have shared on sites such as Greasy Fork . Some of our customers at Optimal use Splunk Synthetic Monitoring for monitoring their websites (they were previously known as Rigor until their recent acquisition ..read more

There have been many high profile cases of outages occurring across major websites. E-commerce sites can have many individual moving pieces - content management, product management, search capabilities, payment, fulfilment, account management, fraud detection, and a whole host of other 3rd party systems that are combined in order to create a seamless experience for their customers. If any one of these components fails it can spell disaster for the end user, who will readily get frustrated and take their money elsewhere ..read more

We recently touched upon the Core Web Vitals in our previous article . These metrics are being introduced in June - August of 2021 and will be a ranking factor on where a website will appear on a Google search results. They are otherwise known as Tier 1 Performance Metrics and play a very important role in a website’s performance and user experience. What you may not know is that there are another set of metrics called Tier 2 Performance Metrics ..read more

You may have heard that a web page’s user experience has been a growing topic of conversation in recent years. Understanding these factoring signals and making any necessary evaluations and changes should be a priority for all website owners. As part of this initiative, Google have launched Core Web Vitals , a series of benchmarks essential to measuring and enhancing the user experience on the web, launching from mid-June to August 2021 ..read more

The amount of content a page contains is one of many determining factors on how fast your web page will perform, giving you a better conversion rate over your competitors. A Performance Budget will serve as a guide for you in deciding which features to keep or add to the site, and which ones to drop. As such, these budgets don’t define the performance goals so much as they support the performance goals ..read more

This is evident in the rapid growth of Static Site Generators (SSGs) and changes to popular ranking algorithms like Google’s that have introduced Core Web Vitals which includes consideration of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) , First Input Delay (FID) , and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) . Chart courtesy of star-history.t9t.io As you probably already know, SSGs are frameworks that generate static (serverless) websites that by nature are highly performant and extremely secure ..read more

Without this, performance in China can be hit or miss – and often excruciatingly slow during peak hours. The trouble is that content outside the country needs to go through the Great Firewall (GFW). This presents a challenge for providers serving the Chinese market, because this more often than not is a huge bottleneck which can turn a normal website experience into something excruciatingly painful. The first step to being able to serve content from China is to apply for and get approved an ICP (Internet Content Provider License ..read more

China is a rapidly growing market. At the time of writing, this country contained: 20% of the global population 10% of the global wealth a middle class of over 109 million people. According to a report published by Credit Suisse, China’s wealth growth is especially impressive when viewed over a longer time frame. In 2000, the country’s wealth was similar to that of the U.S. circa 1939, the report found ..read more

In this article we will introduce a few example tools and techniques specific to Jenkins , the most popular CI/CD automation tool. What is CI/CD? CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery / continuous deployment. It’s both a methodology and a toolset for introducing automation into various development stages. Traditionally apps and websites have been deployed manually, following a prescribed series of steps. CI/CD changes this by introducing a whole series of additional tooling into the mix that makes sure that you can automatically deploy code and features into your prod ..read more