#also remember to always download documents you may need in the future!! websites always updates stuff and you never know

[misskamelie]

Being the person who has a somewhat concrete idea of when different deadlines are sure feels empowering, lol

[russellacali]

What is Empowerment Technologies?

This blog, Empowerment Technologies, is an insight into what I have learned on our lessons about Empowerment Technologies: ICT for Professional Tracks, for 11th grade, under the teaching of Miss Shaira Denise Dela Cruz. The goal of this blog is to promote ICT and give you some insight into ICT

The first lesson that was discussed was, what is ICT? ICT is the abbreviation for Information and Communication Technologies. It refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunications such as mobile phones, wireless networks, telephones, and other communication mediums. The current state of ICT is WWW or World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web(WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. It has three versions which are Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0. Web 1.0 is the first version and most web pages were static or “read-only web.” 

The second and most used is Web 2.0, which allows users to interact and contribute with the page instead of just reading a page, the users are able to create a user account. Web 2.0 offers us five features: Folksonomy, Rich User Experience, Long Tail, User Participation, and software as a service.

The last is Web 3.0. Its aim is to have machines understand the user’s preference to be able to deliver web content specifically targeting the user. Web 3.0 hasn’t released yet as it still has some problems. Those problems are compatibility, security, vastness, vagueness, and logic.

Moving on to the next lesson which is all about ‘Online Saftey, security, ethics, and etiquette.’ 

The Internet consists of tens of thousands of interconnected networks run by service providers, individual companies, universities, and governments. It is defined as an information highway, which means anyone can access any information through the internet. That is why the internet is one of the most dangerous places, the reason why it is important how to keep yourself and your personal information safe. Some of the information that is in rick when spoiled on the internet are names of your immediate family, address, phone or home number, birthday, email address, your full name, and your previous and current school. It is important to keep this information top secret as cyber-creeps can use these to find you. 

To keep yourself safe:

Be mindful of what you share online.

Do not just accept terms and conditions, read it.

Keep your passwords to yourself, and make sure your password is long, strong, and unique.

Do not talk or meet up with someone you don’t know.

Never post anything about a future vacation. This can signal some robbers about which date they can come and rob your house. It is better to post about your vacation when you got home already.

Add friends you know in real life, don’t accept someone you barely know or met.

Avoid visiting or downloading anything from an untrusted website, make sure to check the icon beside the search box. *picture* According to DigiCert Blog, “How to Know if a Website is Secure?”, Look at the URL of the website. If it begins with “https” instead of “http” it means the site is secured using an SSL certificate (the s stands for secure). SSL certificates secure all of your data as it is passed from your browser to the website’s server.

Make your home wifi private by adding a password.

Make sure to install and update antivirus software on your computer.

Do not reply or check links from suspicious emails as it can lead you to an untrusted site and can hack your laptop or social media.

To give you more information, here are some of the internet threats that we need to be aware of and try to avoid:

The Malware, stands for malicious software. It includes virus, worm, trojan, spyware, adware, and ransomware. The virus is the most common malware. It is a malicious program designed to replicate itself and transfer from one computer to another (internet, local networks, FDs, CDs,etc.). Worms is a standalone piece of malicious software that reproduces itself and spreads from computer to computer. The trojan is a malicious program that disguises as a useful program but once downloaded or installed, leaves your PC unprotected and allows hackers to get your information. Spyware is defined by Webroot Cybersecurity as "malware used for the purpose of secretly gathering data on an unsuspecting user." It is a program that runs in the background and spies your behavior as you are on your computer. Adware is malware that forces your browser to redirect to web advertisements, which often themselves seek to download further, even more, malicious software. Lastly, Ransomware, also known as scareware. This is a type of malicious software from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim’s data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid.

The Spam, this is any kind of unwanted, unsolicited digital communication, often an email, that gets sent out in bulk.

The Phishing, is a cybercrime in which a target/s are contacted by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords.

Lastly, before we move to the next lesson it is important to know ‘The Core Rules of Netiquette’ are excerpted from the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea.

First, Remember the Human.When communicating online, practice the Golden rule:  Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Remember that your written works or messages are read by real people, therefore you should ask yourself, "Would I be okay with this if someone else had written it?" before sending it. 

Second, Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life. It is a must that your best to act within the laws and ethical manners of society whenever you inhabit "cyberspace." Standards of behavior may be different in some areas of cyberspace, but they are not lower than in real life. Be ethical. Don't believe anyone who says, "The only ethics out there are what you can get away with."  

Third, Know where you are in cyberspace. What's perfectly acceptable in one area may be dreadfully rude in another. And because Netiquette is different in different places, it's important to know where you are. Thus the next corollary: Lurk before you leap.

Fourth, Respect other people’s time and bandwidth. Online communication takes time: time to read and time in which to respond. Most people today lead busy lives, just like you do, and don't have time to read or respond to frivolous emails or discussion posts. It's your responsibility to ensure that the time they spend reading your posting isn't wasted.

Fifth, Make yourself look good online. One of the best things about the virtual world is the lack of judgment associated with your physical appearance, the sound of your voice, or the clothes you wear. However, you will be judged by the quality of your writing so keep in mind the following tips: (1)Always check for spelling and grammar errors, (2)  Know what you're talking about and state it clearly

Sixth, Share expert knowledge. The reason for asking questions online works is that a lot of knowledgeable people are reading the questions. And if even a few of them offer intelligent answers, the sum total of world knowledge increases. The Internet itself was founded and grew because scientists wanted to share information. Gradually, the rest of us got in on the act. So do your part. Despite the long lists of no-no's in this book, you do have something to offer. Don't be afraid to share what you know.

Seventh, Help keep flame wars under control. "Flaming" is what people do when they express a strongly held opinion without holding back any emotion.g. While "flaming" is not necessarily forbidden in virtual communication, "flame wars," when two or three people exchange angry posts between one another, must be controlled or the camaraderie of the group could be compromised. Don't feed the flames; extinguish them by guiding the discussion back to a more productive direction.

Eighth, Respect other people’s privacy. Depending on what you are reading in the virtual world, be it an online class discussion forum, Facebook page, or an email, you may be exposed to some private or personal information that needs to be handled with care. Thus, Just as you expect others to respect your privacy, so should you respect the privacy of others. Be sure to err on the side of caution when deciding to discuss or not to discuss virtual communication.

Ninth, Don’t abuse your power. Some people in cyberspace have more power than others. There are wizards in MUDs (multi-user dungeons), experts in every office, and system administrators in every system. Knowing more than others, or having more power than they do, does not give you the right to take advantage of them. For example, sysadmins should never read private emails.

Tenth, Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes. Everyone was a network newbie once. So when someone makes a mistake, whether it's a spelling error or a spelling flame, a stupid question or an unnecessarily long answer, be kind about it. If you do decide to inform someone of a mistake, point it out politely, and preferably by private email rather than in public. Give people the benefit of the doubt; assume they just don't know any better.

The last lesson that was taught to us is ‘Advanced Word Processing Skill’. This lesson focuses on the software word processor the ‘Microsoft Word.’

A Word Processor is an electronic device or computer software application that performs the task of composing, editing, formatting,  and printing of documents.​

Microsoft Word is a word processor developed by  Microsoft and the first released on  October 25, 1983.​ Microsoft Word has features and functions which are not mostly known by others. These are the Auto-Correct, Grammar Checker, Read Aloud, Template, Thesaurus, Mail Merge, and Text Wrap. 

Advance Features of Microsoft Word are discussed. Beginning with the kinds of Materials we can have in Microsoft Word.

The first is Pictures. Generally, these are electronic or digital pictures or photographs you have saved on any local storage device.​ There are three file formats that pictures have which are JPEG or Joint Photographic Expert Group, this can support 16.7 million colors so that it is suitable for use when working with full-color photographic images, GIF or Graphics Interchange Format, this is used for computer-generated images that support animation,  can only support up to 256 colors., lastly, PNG or Portable Network Graphics, this is similar to GIF except it has smaller file size but does not support animation, it can display up to 16 million colors and allows the control of the transparency level or opacity of images.​

The second material is Clip Art. This is generally a GIF type; line art drawings or images used as a generic representation for ideas and objects that you might want to integrate into your document.​

The third is Shapes. These are printable objects or materials that you can integrate in your document to enhance its appearance or to allow you to have some tools to use for composing and representing ideas or messages. The fourth is Smart Art. Generally, these are predefined sets of different shapes grouped together to form ideas that are organizational or structural in nature.

The fifth is Chart. Another type of material that you can integrate into your Word document that allows you to represent data characteristics and trends.

The sixth is Screenshot. Sometimes, creating reports or manuals for training or  procedure will require the integration of a more realistic image of  what you are discussing on your report or manual.

Moving on to the most focused part of the lesson which is the Mail Merge. Mail Merge is a useful tool that allows you to produce multiple letters, labels, envelopes, name tags, and more using information stored in a list, database, or spreadsheet. When these two documents are combined  (merged), each document includes the individual names and addresses you need to send it to. The two components of Mail Merge are the Form Document, this contains the main body of the message we want to convey or send., and the List or Data File, This is where the individual information or data that needs to be plugged in (merged) to our form document is placed and maintained.​

It was demonstrated to us, how to use and make mail merge, and here’s mine:

Before ending this blog, I would like to show you some of my modules for the subject Empowerment Technologies(ETech): ICT for Professional Track.

First, the open forum about the “How can you promote Netiquette?”

Second, an assignment about “Cyberspace:  Share an experience that you have always tend to do but later did you discover that it is not a standard of ONLINE SAFETY, SECURITY, ETHICS, AND ETIQUETTE. “

Third, another open forum about “What is the importance of Microsoft office in your education?”

Lastly is another assignment, making an Infographic: Promoting your specific track/strand. My infographic is a promotion of my strand, STEM or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Hope you learn a lot from this blog as I learn a lot from my subject teacher for  Empowerment Technologies(ETech): ICT for Professional Track. 

Let this day be filled with success in all the ventures you make today. Have a great day!

Photo Credits:

1

https://curatti.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WWW-Image-1.jpg 

2

https://go4customer.com/articleimages/1581925569Safety_Internet_Day.png 

3 

https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/articles/internet_attacks.jpg 

4

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fc/37/e1/fc37e162244d19115d88ab58e07ccc2b.png 

5

https://cdn.guidingtech.com/imager/assets/2019/05/226896/Image-Best-Microsoft-Word-Online-Tips-and-Tricks 2_4d470f76dc99e18ad75087b1b8410ea9.png?1558678050 

[rsballiance]

Be careful, online games may turn out to be the main channel for hacker assaults in the near future

Because of the outbreak of the brand new crown epidemic, many people need to stay at home, and playing games is among the most main method of recreation. With the increase of the game market and people's extreme investment in video games, hackers have targeted video game players. Compared with January of this year, in April, the amount of people blocked from going to game-related malicious web sites or browsing such websites from game-related websites (forums) increased by 54%. IN-MAY, the indicator showed a downward development: it was down 18% compared to April. The number of blocked attempts to access phishing websites using video game themes has increased. It is particularly worth mentioning that from February to April, the amount of notifications from bogus web sites on the Steam video gaming system increased by 40%. The games most regularly attacked by attackers are Minecraft, Counter-Hit: Global Offensive, and TheWitcher 3: Wild Hunt. The users most subject to such attacks are from Vietnam (7.9%), Algeria (6.6%), South Korea (6.2%), Hungary (6.2%) and Romania (6%). Information from various sources indicate that gamer activity has increased dramatically because of the coronavirus pandemic. In accordance with data from gamesindustry.biz, inside March, both computer and game gaming console game sales increased significantly.

Game sales development during the 7 days of March 16-22 In April, the amount of Steam downloads and the amount of online gamers attained record peaks. The next Steam user activity graph (which includes in-video game and client-only installation) (data from the Steam data source) implies that users have the most activity on April 4th. Since then, the activity started to decrease and the rate also slowed up. In addition, through the epidemic, gamers have already been online for a long period.

Steam users each day These circumstances reflected inside the figure are understandable. To begin with, people have more free time to enjoy games. Statistics collected by Nielsen Games (within normal surveys of gamers) confirm this argument:

Gamers from different nations/regions save money time using video games Second, obviously not really everyone who wants to spending some time playing video games includes a computer that allows them to play games. You can understand this by looking at the hardware stats shown on the Steam site. Invest the a closer consider the graph that contains the graphics cards information used by Steam customers, you can observe a clear transformation on the graph, that is completely smooth before March 2020. Up to now, the sales ratio of Nvidia, Intel and AMD provides increased significantly. Since the beginning of the quarantine, the talk about of Intel and AMD images cards has grown significantly. Before you understand that there were more than 20 million Steam customers, this raise was within 2%, which appears trivial. Put simply, the amount of products with Intel and AMD images cards has elevated by hundreds of thousands. Considering the features of images cards from various manufacturers, we are able to safely assume these hundreds of products were delivered to office at home computers through the quarantine time period, and folks installed Steam without the bosses viewing them.

This is also confirmed by the sudden change in the ratio of Intel and AMD processors in the chart (Intel also began to grow from isolation); the amount of cores used by players (atypical development in the proportion of 4-primary and 2-primary processors) ):

Needless to say, cybercriminals haven't noticed the upsurge in the amount of gamers and enough time they spend in the game. For a long time, gamers have already been the favourite targets of attackers, that are mainly thinking about the login title and password of the game account. Now, with the raise of work apparatus in the home system, the attacker's attack on the player will not only straight have the attack income, but also take the opportunity to understand the business's infrastructure. Because house networks have a lower degree of security defense than corporate networks, it is possible for attackers to monitor players' devices. In the first five weeks of 2020, the amount of vulnerabilities discovered on Steam has exceeded the amount of vulnerabilities discovered in earlier years. This reality implies that attackers are significantly thinking about discovering like vulnerabilities.

Because you can remember, at the end of April 2020, Valve discovered the foundation code of popular online games CS: GO and Group Fortress 2. The attacker is most likely already attempting to parse their code to find something that may be used for attack purposes. Loopholes. It is important to recognize that these are not really offline video games, but online games that require connection to video game servers and frequent updates. This makes their customers more vulnerable to assaults because their products are obviously generally online, and gamers are always ready to install "updates" in order never to lose the latest ability to play games. However, even if there are no zero-day vulnerabilities available, the attacker still includes a broad attack space, because as the number of players raises significantly, there will certainly be a large numbers of common vulnerabilities used by security novices. The logic of the attacker is: as the number of players increases, the likelihood of a phishing attack increases. Kaspersky Anti-Phishing and Kaspersky Safety Network (KSN) confirmed this. Compared with February, the amount of clicks on thousands of the most popular phishing websites with the term "Steam" in their titles has increased significantly, and this attack peaked in April.

Compared to February 2020, the amount of hits on phishing and Steam-related topics provides increased Anti-virus detection data for web sites using game designs has increased significantly, for example, including the titles of well-known video games and gaming platforms.

Number of cyber attacks using game designs from January to Might 2020 All sorts of malicious programs have many malicious links, such as malicious software that steals passwords, ransomware, and mining software. As generally, they counterfeit free of charge versions, updates or extensions of well-known video games, and deceptive programs. An identical situation can be seen in malicious documents that make use of game-related titles without being noticed. Use game-related subjects as attack channels These statistics usually do not take into account threats such as hacker tools, which are usually installed by customers themselves, but may be used for malicious purposes. We include remote control access clients, visitors analyzers, etc. in this type. This type is interesting right here because contemporary deception programs frequently use the same techniques as malware, such as memory injection and exploiting vulnerabilities to bypass defense. If we add this recognition to the stats, it'll occupy the first place with a 10% share. According to the stats obtained from our network antivirus, the attackers are usually most concerned about the use of Minecraft. "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" in addition has entered the top 3 most developed games.

Number of assaults on online games from January to Might 2020 Based on monitoring the dynamic shifts in the reaction to the hyperlink containing the game name, we figured from April in order to early Might, the attacker utilized multiple games as the target of attack whenever they attacked. In particular, "Overwatch" and "Unidentified Player" are employed the most. If you look carefully at the image below, you will see many parallel peaks.

Make use of Overwatch and PUBG designs for cyber attacks Attackers inside Vietnam can simply use game-related themes to attack. In this country, almost 8% of system antivirus detections occur on websites named after video game themes. As shown in the amount below, from January to May 2020, the top 20 nations in the attack efforts with the theme of online games.

he top five countries after Vietnam include Algeria, South Korea, Hungary and Romania. In general, the top 20 includes many nations in North Africa, Asia and Europe, specifically Southern and Eastern Europe.

Summarizing the speedy development of the game industry through the epidemic, of course, attackers took advantage of this pattern, and we found that attempts to change to game-themed phishing web sites have increased significantly. However, it must be remembered that is not entirely to be blamed for the attacker, but also because of the user's carelessness. They are obviously fake emails sent to the game service, or they're searching for hacked customers, or seeking to crack some well-known versions. Games and deception programs. Unfortunately, generally, cybercriminals do not need technologically sophisticated answers to launch successful assaults.

[pkgam]

Google Stadia Thoughts

You knew I had to cover this one! Long story short: This obviously will never work! XD

Well, I mean yeah I’ll bet they’ll successfully sucker people to their platform like they always do and make a fortune. But the way the platform works requires them to handle all the game’s inputs, processing power AND send it through the net completely lag free to maybe 10ms at most (Remember Display Lag deems anything at 20ms or lower to be "excellent”, so you’d also need a screen at 10ms or better. 9ms is the lowest I have seen. But remember that this is supposed to be possible to do even on MOBILE). Google’s incompetence can’t even get Youtube consistent, so you can only imagine how they handle something a billion times more complicated. Game Streaming services aren’t new either and all the ones that have been out (even for a long while) have had latency issues. If veterans can’t work out all the bugs in it, the below average workers of Google have little chance of pulling it off.

Even if Google’s servers can handle the needs of the game, they still need to show you your input instantly. That’s where the player’s internet connection needs to be fast and stable enough to stream themselves playing the game. Because that’s basically what it is: A video player for your own gameplay. Given how inconsistent the internet runs in general, that is impossible to fix unless they are providing perfect internet to you somehow. Well........ for the most part. You see, they plan to implement a “negative latency” feature to Stadia that will supposedly predict player input. That’s right. They will be using algorithms to predict how you will move, shoot, navigate menus, etc... sometimes. So there will likely be situations where you’re trying to jump a pit and you just don’t jump or you move into a hazard because no algorithm they have ever made has been good. It also begs the question that if algorithms are going to do inputs it thinks you’ll do, are you actually “playing”?

I also question their skills in getting games to run properly. Oftentimes you have to reconfigure your own system to get things to not bug out. Users can get their own systems configured properly relatively quickly ether through their own experience or by looking up the answer other members of the community have figured out and posted to help others with DuckDuckGo, but getting Google to fix anything is an uphill battle. Since they also claim to update the games as patches are released and whatnot, they are likely going to have to keep reconfiguring their own systems accordingly to get them to run right. Knowing them, theyll just set them to update automatically and not even test, leaving players to send bug reports and wait for them to fix a broke game, if they ever do because bug reports usually end up unread in their proverbial paper shredder.

What I think they are trying to do though is fill a niche of players who want to play the high-end PC games but don’t know enough about gaming and the internet to understand why it won’t work and don’t want to commit to buying/learning to build a high-end system. Thinking they will have a solution to their desires. So when people see Google fronting the hardware and only saying that you need a internet connection speed of so-and-so much, they’ll jump on it, until they use it for a while and find that it doesn’t work well. But of course Google is never about making the best service, they just want to get into every field they can for data collection and the money.

Also, you know my qualms with digital-only game distribution? You can bet that I have those same stances times 1,000 with Stadia. Google is not known to keep their products running for a very long time. This is relatively known by people already, but if you didn’t know and were curious, I know of two websites that have documented the things they murdered through the years:

https://gcemetery.co/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

That doesn’t give me much confidence that Google will keep it going for long or at the very least allow for game preservation. Remember that the very service of Stadia is a “game streaming” service. Meaning by the very nature of it, you never have even a downloaded copy of the game. In fact, one of their selling points is that you don’t fill up your hard drive with games, but that also means you never have a copy of the game. Not even digital to try and put on some backup physical media or something. You rely entirely on Google to play and have access the game. Good luck with that.

So all this talk about games though... Maybe you don’t care if they will have lag because you just want to play the games and you trust Google to stay online consistently for years to come. Then the game lineup must be something that’ll sell itself... Right? Hate to break it to you but...

https://store.google.com/us/product/stadia_games

That is about as mediocre of a game lineup as it gets for the most part with some of today’s worst gaming companies that likely just want to put their micro-transactions on as many places as they can. XD EA, Bethesda, 2k, etc... Mostly games out for a while too, but there a few that require high system specs, which may be what Google was going for to try and show off the power and entice people into signing up. There is a single exclusive at launch: GYLT, which actually looks good. But is it $120/year plus the cost of the game itself good?... I’d much rather wait for it to be ported to other platforms, which is a very likely scenario because as with all other games on there: They are made by third parties. So chances are when their contract with Stadia exclusivity ends , it’ll be plopped on other platforms. like “Get Packed” will be doing. Google is not making any games for it themselves as far as I am aware actually. Maybe they will do so in the future, but I can’t see them commit to bigger game projects than something like Chrome Dino unless they plan on keeping Stadia around. But even then I don’t see them making something masterful. They can’t even match online puzzle cube simulators made years before their tribute to the Rubik’s Cube. Their cube is so laggy and so inconsistent with movement tracking on all the PCs and browsers I’ve tried it on it’s unreal. Yeah... I actually thought it was something on my end at first which is why I tried a bunch of things because I just couldn’t believe they messed up something that was already mastered by many...

Your thoughts? Thanks for reading and have a good one!

[abymtechnology]

Content Management System & How To Choose One For The Company

A content management system (CMS) is a computer program that helps you manage your organization's digital assets, such as your website content.

A CMS can be used independently or in conjunction with other business applications. You can set it up on your network, use a web-based option, or install the program on your devices locally.

Categories of content management systems

Different types of content management systems exist to handle different sorts of content.

CMS is divided into several groups:

web content management systems

enterprise content management systems

mobile content management systems

digital asset management systems

media asset management systems

document and records management systems

component content management systems

What are web content management systems?

A web content management system is a software tool that lets you create, manage, and publish online content without knowing the code.

A web content management system usually has two components:

A content management application with a user-friendly interface for non-technical people to add, manage, and delete web content

A content delivery application with back-end functionality for content delivery to the website

How does a web content management system work?

A web content management system (CMS) allows you to access your website's database using a simple, graphical user interface, which is commonly accessed through a web browser. You can use this interface to access a variety of content management tools to assist you:

Create and publish new pages, or make modifications to existing content and pages, or completely erase them.

To manage the layout of your pages, use pre-set categories, themes, or templates.

Ensure that your material is presented consistently across the whole website.

Manage your website's structure and navigation, including menus and sitemaps.

Keep track of authorship permissions and editorial workflows.

Use your database to store and retrieve various forms of content, such as text, photos, podcasts, and videos.

Larger companies may require additional CMS features like multi-site or multi-lingual support. Take a look at some of the most important CMS features and services.

Your CMS should be tailored to your specific company requirements and capable of handling the many sorts of content you'll be managing, such as text, audio, video, social network feeds, and so on. Learn how to select the finest CMS for your company.

What are enterprise content management systems?

Documents and other content related to an organization's processes are often stored in enterprise content management systems. They frequently incorporate services like web content management, document and records management, workflow and collaboration tools, and so on.

Different types of content management systems

A CMS aids in comprehending the variations between the many types, their features and functions, and price structures. As a result, selecting one for your company is advantageous.

Types and examples of content management systems:

Open source, proprietary, and Software-as-a-Service CMS, which includes cloud-based solutions, are the three main forms of CMS software.

Open-source CMS

Open-source CMS software is available for free to download. There are no contracts, license fees, or upgrading fees.

However, you may have to pay for the following items if you use an open-source CMS:

Technical assistance during installation and setup.

Customization to enhance the software's functionality beyond the core offering.

Suitable templates, add-ons, and plugins.

Staff training.

Software support, including regular updates.

The following are some of the most extensively used open-source CMS platforms:

WordPress

Joomla

Drupal

Magento

PrestaShop

On a web server, you can install and operate open source CMS. There are numerous customizations available to satisfy various business demands, such as e-commerce plugins, tools to assist you to optimize content for search engines, and the ability to personalize your design themes and layouts.

Proprietary CMS

A single business develops and manages proprietary or commercial CMS software. Using a CMS like this usually entails:

purchasing a license fee for using the program.

paying a monthly or annual price for updates or support.

Additional fees for customization and updates, as well as training and continuing technical or user support, may be required.

The following are some examples of popular CMS solutions:

Kentico

Microsoft SharePoint

IBM Enterprise Content Management

Pulse CMS

Sitecore

Shopify

Although customizing proprietary CMS with built-in functionality is normally possible, it may come at a cost. Be aware that integrating a proprietary CMS with an existing website or back-end system may involve further development.

If you're building a new website, it's ideal to go with a CMS that includes all of the necessary features and functionalities to satisfy your present and future business demands.

Software as a Service (SaaS) CMS

Web content management software, web hosting, and technical support are generally included within SaaS CMS packages. These are cloud-based virtual solutions that are paid for per user or site.

In most cases, the price includes:

the amount of data transferred.

storage for your content and data.

continuing assistance.

Cloud content management systems are divided into two categories:

'Fully cloud' CMS: It is frequently included in a package or service. Because these are usually proprietary systems under the control of the seller, it isn't always possible to tailor their functionality to fit your needs.

'Partial cloud' CMS: It's on the cloud web server you're using. It gives you more flexibility because you can enhance the functionality using add-on modules or by editing the source code.

Small and medium-sized organizations can gain a lot from cloud CMS. Consider:

Costs are often minimal - a one-time setup fee usually covers the basics.

The SaaS provider handles the upgrades, maintenance, and technical concerns.

Any computer, laptop, or smartphone with an internet connection can run the software.

Software and feature updates are accessible in real-time.

Packages are highly scalable; as your needs vary, you can add more sites or users.

Choose the best CMS for your business

It's difficult to choose a content management system for the company. It involves a detailed analysis of features, prices, scalability, integration, and all your company's requirements.

Most companies start the decision process by ensuring that they have a thorough awareness of their company's current and future needs, as well as its content management processes. Create a precise list of requirements for the CMS and select what you can and can't go without from the start.

Using the MoSCoW technique to prioritize your CMS requirements is an excellent idea:

Must have features you can't work without.

Should have features you consider significant but not time-sensitive.

Could have features you desire but aren't necessary for performance.

Would have features that seem nice but are not required at this time.

This method of prioritizing features will provide you with a requirement matrix against which you can compare and contrast different solutions and their functionality.

Remember to communicate with every team within your company to understand their needs and organizational requirements. Consider:

IT team may require a CMS that is compatible with the current infrastructure stack.

The sales team could seek CRM or integrate e-payment systems.

The marketing team might be looking for automation or digital marketing tools.

Make sure the platform you chose is suited for e-commerce if you plan to sell products or services from your website. Take a look at some of the most important CMS features and services.

Some of the most important considerations when selecting a new CMS are:

ease of use

Technical knowledge to use the CMS

type of platform i.e. open-source, proprietary, or cloud

brilliant features and capabilities

customization: adding new features and functionality

third-party integration with CRM or e-commerce platform

scalability

responsiveness

ease of deployment

design flexibility

security

support of communities, forums, user support, etc.

When selecting a CMS, you must also evaluate your budget and licensing options. Some platforms are free to use, while others demand payment. Be realistic about both the initial and recurring expenses, such as license renewals, hosting, and future development.

Every project is unique, but the considerations outlined above should help you limit down your options to select a handful that meets your specific business needs. Before making a final decision, view a demo, speak with current users, and try out the product.

The procedure of selecting a CMS provider is comparable to that of selecting any other IT provider. You need to work with someone you can trust and who will be there for you every step of the way. You'll also need a CMS provider who can meet your needs at a reasonable price. 

[falguniseo841]

TIDE REFERRAL CODE

TIDE REFERRAL CODE

 Tide Referral Code: FREE75

This is a Tide Partnership Code with significant benefits over other codes you may find online.

Deposit £1 within 3 months and you will receive £75 FREE cash added     to your balance*

FREE bank transfers for 12 Months

FREE Ltd Company formation included when setting up your new     account if needed

*(which is far quicker & easier to activate compared to other codes which require £500 of card transactions).

Remember, Use code FREE75 and you only need to deposit £1 into your account within 3 months to get £75 FREE (Please allow 4-6 weeks to receive your free cash). There are no other codes online which offer these added benefits. Watch out for fake codes offering £100. They do not exist (read the small print). TIDE REFERRAL CODE

I started a new business a few months ago (more on that to follow on this blog) but I needed a new business bank account. After doing a bit of research and deciding I didn’t want to go with one of the boring old high street banks. I found TIDE which seemed to offer everything I needed.

What I knew before joining up was that unlike a majority of the high street banks I could be setup with a new account and have an account number within minutes of getting verified and all directly from the app! I usually bank with a one of the major high street banks and when I contacted them I was told I needed to make an appointment and bring all my documents and it would take at least a week to get everything arranged. Nope, that just wasn’t for me.

The referral code provided by my colleague definitely helped persuade me 😉 – I mean there are a number of challenger ‘online only’ banks who offer similar services but my blog is centred around finding referral codes for you and I to use – So I had to go with Tide right? You can use my referral code: FREE50 to get £50 bonus within 6-8 weeks of joining! You only need to fund your account with £50 within 3 months of account opening to activate. Be careful of websites offering £100. I nearly joined using a £100 referral code only to find they were hiding the fact that it was really only £50 and I needed to complete £500 of debit card transactions. For my small business I’ve been using my account for over 12 months and still haven’t used my debit card.

 Tide Referral Code

Did I mention the extremely cheap banking fees? There are very few banks that offer free banking for business users but I found that although TIDE are not free the prices they charge are minimal. For me it was ideal as I only have a handful of transactions going through my account so from a cost perspective this account suits me just fine. You should work out how many transactions you are expecting on a yearly basis to work out if the basic package at Tide is for you. The code FREE75 actually gives you free transfers for a year included which is a definite bonus. TIDE REFERRAL CODE

For those of you with larger businesses or more specific banking needs – Tide is still the bank I would recommend. Their offering goes way beyond what you can get from your high street branch. Some of these are paid for services but most are actually FREE. The below graphic shows what is included in the paid packages at Tide. I myself haven’t upgraded to the Tide plus card because for a single employee with relatively simple banking needs the basic free package is more than sufficient but for larger businesses out there the paid for packages could be more cost effective with the added bonus of cashback and expense cards for your teams.

One thing I should point out and probably should have done at the outset is the Tide app – which is definitely a success story in itself. Everything I need from Tide is in the app and in over 12 months I have had not needed to speak to anyone at Tide, go into a bank branch (they don’t have any actually branches on the High street) or needed something that wasn’t already available. They really have thought of most things! The user interface is simple and easy to use (something the old guard could learn from) and access to the desktop app is quirky, simple and very secure and logs in through a QR code scanned on your phone. If in the unlikely event you do need to speak to someone then you can contact directly through the in app chat feature and you should be able to speak to someone in minutes. TIDE REFERRAL CODE

Moving forwards I can only see Tide getting better. They have been adding more and more services to Tide over the last 12 months I have been a customer and I expect this to continue into the future. They have a very active community forum and they love to keep everyone updated on what they have planned and always seek feedback from users on what we would like added next. As of today you can now get account integration with some of the most popular accounting software packages, read access for your employees, send/pay and track invoices and get best of all for me at least is getting your account setup in minutes.

Overall I am very impressed with TIDE :-). I get everything I need from a bank that has been built from the ground up to be an online bank the functionality and user experience are fantastic. If you need a business bank account you should check them out. Not sure what else I can add really. If this review hasn’t made you want to join Tide if you are looking for a business bank account I��m not sure what will. TIDE REFERRAL CODE

Tide Business Account Overview

£75 signup bonus by entering the code FREE75 (payable     within 6-8 weeks of account opening)

Sign-up in as little as 10 minutes on a mobile device or via the     web. You can also choose to register your company at the same time (for     free) saving valuable time in getting your company and/or account set up     to operate without having to visit any branches.

No credit check required to open an account, therefore there is no     risk in trying out Tide alongside an existing account

Free sign-up, with no annual or monthly fees

1 Year of FREE UK bank Transfers

Free Mastercard usage (at home and overseas)

Access to all Tide Platform product features to manage their     business admin such as the Company Registration tool, Virtual Office     Address, Receipt Importer, VAT Manager (which links to HMRC), Expense     Management, Expense Team Cards, Accountancy Software Integrations,     Invoicing Tool, Invoice Protection, Invoicing by Direct Debit (with     GoCardless), and Apple Pay

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is the Tide Business Banking app referral code? Use referral code: FREE75 to get £75 FREE cash added to your balance, FREE bank transfers for 1 year and FREE LTD company formation if required. TIDE REFERRAL CODE

I’ve seen an offer for £100 FREE cash with Tide? There is NO legitimate £100 offer. Be careful using a code promising £100 as you will end up with no bonus. This is the BEST offer and it is in partnership with Tide and EXCLUSIVE to Referandsave. You only need to fund your account with £1 within 3 months to receive your bonus payment.

How do you open an account with TIDE business banking? You can register directly at the tide.co website or you can download the ios or android app and register directly in app. Don’t forget to use the Referandsave EXCLUSIVE referral code: FREE75 to get £75 for opening an account.

What is the criteria to get your £75 free cash at Tide banking? You must use referral code: FREE75 when registering or within 1 week of registering by contacting through the in app chat feature. You must then fund your account within 3 months with £1 to receive your £75 bonus cash. It can take 4-6 weeks to receive your bonus payment.

www.referandsave.co.uk/tide/

[advancetaxreliefexperts]

SOME TAX TIPS AND DEDUCTIONS  FOR 2020

OVERVIEW

Your tax bill isn't chiseled in stone at the end of the year. Here are some tax tips and steps you can take after January 1 to help you lower your taxes, save money when preparing your tax return, and avoid tax penalties.

UPDATE: The Treasury recently announced tax changes and updates in response to COVID-19, updates include an extension of the first installment of tax year 2020 quarterly estimated taxes to July 15, 2020. Some information in this post however requires additional IRS guidance and may require updating. We will update as soon as we receive additional guidance. Please see the latest information on tax deadlines and updates related to COVID-19 here.

If you think your tax bill is chiseled in stone at the end of the year, think again. Though it’s true that most money-saving options to defer income or accelerate deductions become much more limited after December 31, there is still a lot you can do to make the tax-filing season cheaper and easier. Here are some tax tips to help you lower your taxes, save money when preparing your tax return, and avoid tax penalties.

NEED HELP WITH IRS BACK TAXES, AUDIT REPRESENTATION OR SMALL BUSINESS TAX PREPARATION? ADVANCE TAX RELIEF LLC www.advancetaxrelief.com BBB A+ RATED CALL (713)300-3965

1. Contribute to retirement accounts If you haven’t already funded your retirement account for 2019, do so by April 15, 2020. That’s the deadline for contributions to a traditional IRA, deductible or not, and to a Roth IRA.

If you have a Keogh or SEP and you get a filing extension to October 15, 2020, you can wait until then to put 2019 contributions into those accounts.

To start tax-free compounding as quickly as possible, however, don’t dawdle in making contributions.

Making a deductible contribution will help you lower your tax bill this year. Plus, your contributions will compound tax-deferred. It’s hard to find a better deal.

If you put away $5,000 a year for 20 years in an investment with an average annual 8% return, your $100,000 in contributions will grow to $247,000.

The same investment in a taxable account would grow to only about $194,000 if you’re in the 25% federal tax bracket (and even less if you live in a state with a state income tax to bite into your return).

To qualify for the full annual IRA deduction in 2019, you must: not be eligible to participate in a company retirement plan, or If  you are eligible, you must have adjusted gross income of $64,000 or less for singles, or $103,000 or less for married couples filing jointly.

If you are not eligible for a company plan but your spouse is, your traditional IRA contribution is fully-deductible as long as your combined gross income does not exceed $193,000. For 2019, the maximum IRA contribution you can make is $6,000 ($7,000 if you are age 50 or older by the end of the year). For self-employed persons, the maximum annual addition to SEPs and Keoghs for 2019 is $56,000.

Although choosing to contribute to a Roth IRA instead of a traditional IRA will not cut your 2019 tax bill—Roth contributions are not deductible—it could be the better choice because all withdrawals from a Roth can be tax-free in retirement.

Withdrawals from a traditional IRA are fully taxable in retirement. To contribute the full $6,000 ($7,000 if you are age 50 or older by the end of 2019) to a Roth IRA, you must earn $122,000 or less a year if you are single or $193,000 if you’re married and file a joint return.

The amount you save for making a contribution will vary. If you are in the 25% tax bracket and make a deductible IRA contribution of $6,000, you will save $1,500 in taxes the first year. Over time, future contributions will save you thousands, depending on your contribution, income tax bracket, and the number of years you keep the money invested.

2. Make a last-minute estimated tax payment If you didn’t pay enough to the IRS during the year, you may have a big tax bill staring you in the face. Plus, you might owe significant interest and penalties, too.

According to IRS rules, you must pay 100% of last year’s tax liability or 90% of this year’s tax or you will owe an underpayment penalty.

If your adjusted gross income for 2018 was more than $150,000, you have to pay more than 110% of your 2018 tax liability to be protected from a tax year 2019 underpayment penalty.

If you make an estimated payment by January 15, you can erase any penalty for the fourth quarter, but you still will owe a penalty for earlier quarters if you did not send in any estimated payments back then.

But, if your income windfall arrived after August 31, 2019, you can file Form 2210: Underpayment of Estimated Tax to annualize your estimated tax liability, and possibly reduce any extra charges.

A note of caution: Try not to pay too much. It’s better to owe the government a little rather than to expect a refund. Remember, the IRS doesn’t give you a dime of interest when it borrows your money.

3. Organize your records for tax time Good organization may not cut your taxes. But there are other rewards, and some of them are financial. For many, the biggest hassle at tax time is getting all of the documentation together. This includes last year’s tax return, this year’s W-2s and 1099s, receipts and so on.

How do you get started?

Print out a tax checklist to help you gather all the tax documents you’ll need to complete your tax return. Keep all the information that comes in the mail in January, such as W-2s, 1099s and mortgage interest statements. Be careful not to throw out any tax-related documents, even if they don’t look very important.

Collect receipts and information that you have piled up during the year.

Group similar documents together, putting them in different file folders if there are enough papers.

Make sure you know the price you paid for any stocks or funds you have sold. If you don’t, call your broker before you start to prepare your tax return.

Know the details on income from rental properties. Don’t assume that your tax-free municipal bonds are completely free of taxes. Having this type of information at your fingertips will save you another trip through your files.

4. Find the right tax forms You won’t find all of them at the post office and library. Instead, you can go right to the source online. View and download a large catalog of forms and publications at the Internal Revenue Service website or have them sent to you by mail. You can search for documents as far back as 1980 by number or by date. The IRS also will direct you to sites where you can pick up state forms and publications.

5. Itemize your tax deductions It’s easier to take the standard deduction, but you may save a bundle if you itemize, especially if you are self-employed, own a home or live in a high-tax area. Itemizing is worth it when your qualified expenses add up to more than the 2019 standard deduction of $12,200 for singles and $24,400 for married couples filing jointly. Many deductions are well known, such as those for mortgage interest and charitable donations. You can also deduct the portion of medical expenses that exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income for 2019 (10% of AGI beginning in 2020).

6. Don't shy away from a home office tax deduction The eligibility rules for claiming a home office deduction have been loosened to allow more self-employed filers to claim this break. People who have no fixed location for their businesses can claim a home office deduction if they use the space for administrative or management activities, even if they don’t meet clients there.

As always, you must use the space exclusively for business. Many taxpayers have avoided the home office tax deduction because it has been regarded as a red flag for an audit. If you legitimately qualify for the deduction, however, there should be no problem.

\You are entitled to write off expenses that are associated with the portion of your home where you exclusively conduct business (such as rent, utilities, insurance and housekeeping). The percentage of these costs that is deductible is based on the square footage of the office to the total area of the house. A middle-class taxpayer who uses a home office and pays $1,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment and uses one bedroom exclusively as a home office can easily save $1,000 in taxes a year. People in higher tax brackets with greater expenses can save even more.

One home office trap that used to scare away some taxpayers has been eliminated.

In the past, if you used 10% of your home for a home office, for example, 10% of the profit when you sold did not qualify as tax-free under the rules that let homeowners treat up to $250,000 of profit as tax-free income ($500,000 for married couples filing joint returns).

Since 10% of the house was an office instead of a home, the IRS said, 10% of the profit wasn’t tax-free. But the government has had a change of heart. No longer does a home office put the kibosh on tax-free profit.

You do have to pay tax on any profit that results from depreciation claimed for the office after May 6, 1997. It’s taxed at a maximum rate of 25%. (Depreciation produces taxable profit because it reduces your tax basis in the home; the lower your basis, the higher your profit.)

7. Provide dependent taxpayer IDs on your tax return Be sure to plug in Taxpayer Identification Numbers (usually Social Security Numbers) for your children and other dependents on your return. Otherwise, the IRS will deny any dependent credits that you might be due, such as the Child Tax Credit.

Be especially careful if you are divorced. Only one of you can claim your children as dependents, and the IRS has been checking closely lately to make sure spouses aren’t both using their children as a deduction. If you forget to include a Social Security number for a child, or if you and your ex-spouse both claim the same child, it’s highly likely that the processing of your return (and any refund you’re expecting) will come to a screeching halt while the IRS contacts you to straighten things out.

After you have a baby, be sure to file for your child's Social Security card right away so you have the number ready at tax time. Many hospitals will do this automatically for you. If you don’t have the number you need by the tax filing deadline, the IRS says you should file for an extension rather than sending in a return without a required Social Security number.

8. File and pay on time If you can’t finish your return on time, make sure you file Form 4868 by July 15, 2020. Form 4868 gives you a six-month extension of the filing deadline until October 15, 2020. On the form, you need to make a reasonable estimate of your tax liability for 2019 and pay any balance due with your request.  Requesting an extension in a timely manner is especially important if you end up owing tax to the IRS.

If you file and pay late, the IRS can slap you with a late-filing penalty of 4.5% per month of the tax owed and a late-payment penalty of 0.5% a month of the tax due. The maximum late filing penalty is 22.5% and the late-payment penalty tops out at 25%. By filing Form 4868, you stop the clock running on the costly late-filing penalty.

9. File electronically Electronic filing works best if you expect a tax refund. Because the IRS processes electronic returns faster than paper ones, you can expect to get your refund three to six weeks earlier.  If you have your refund deposited directly into your bank account or IRA, the waiting time is even less.

There are other advantages to e-filing besides a fast refund: The IRS checks your return to make sure that it is complete, which increases your chances of filing an accurate return. Less than 1% of electronic returns have errors, compared with 20% of paper returns.

The IRS also acknowledges that it received your return, a courtesy you don’t get even if you send your paper return by certified mail. That helps you protect yourself from the interest and penalties that accrue if your paper return gets lost. If you owe money, you can file electronically and then wait until the federal tax filing deadline to send in a check along with Form 1040-V. You may be able to pay with a credit card or through a direct debit.

With a credit card, expect to pay a service charge of as much as 2.5%.

With direct debit, you may delay the debiting of your bank account until the actual filing deadline.

GET TAX RELIEF HELP TODAY

Advance Tax Relief is headquartered in Houston, TX.  We help many individuals just like you solve a wide variety of IRS and State tax issues, including penalty waivers, wage garnishments, bank levy, tax audit representation, back tax return preparation, small business form 941 tax issues, the IRS Fresh Start Initiative, Offer In Compromise and much more. Our Top Tax Attorneys, Accountants and Tax Experts are standing by ready to help you resolve or settle your IRS back tax problems.

Advance Tax Relief is rated one of the best tax relief companies nationwide.

#TaxDebtHelp #FilingBackTaxesHelp #TaxReliefHouston #BackTaxRelief #TaxAttorneysNearMe #TaxLawyer #TaxReliefFirms #OfferInCompromise #TaxResolution #LocalTaxAttorney #HelpFilingBackTaxes #TaxDebtSettlement #TaxReliefAttorneys #TaxHelp

[thekookieday-blog]

Selecting Website Hosting - Advice For You

You'll locate many requirements in selecting a web hosting service. First you need to bear in mind that there are two type of host; the 'Complimentary host - these are the solutions we down tons for free yet the solutions as well as benefits we obtain right here is not that enough as well as very minimal.

Second is the 'Business holding - it gives full assistance, benefits and also solutions when ever we require and also the gain access to is unrestricted. When you select hosting Australia solution, select the one that can provide you with quick as well as much better connection to the internet.

If you are establishing an office, it is important to count the amount of computers will be par taking the server. Choosing a host service will depend on the variety of users. The even more individuals you have, the slower the server will be; you should project in searching for Picking Web Hosting Provider - Learn Your Choices

Selecting an ideal web hosting service for your website can be an overwhelming task. Due to the a great deal of services offered, all of which offering a large and varied variety of solutions, it can be challenging to identify which solution is suitable for our needs. Personal website hosting can frequently be obtained at no charge and might even be funded by marketers, making it reasonably reduced in cost. An even more basic solution which may be needed for a local business web site might provide you with website and also data hosting to a little degree. However, in case your cheap web hosting Australia is needed for service applications of a large range, these will certainly come with a much higher price.

The Australian web host solution is made to provide personal customers as well as businesses the chance to release their own site onto the Net. A company will designate area on a server that is had or rented by them, to the site proprietor. This might be in conjunction to also providing the client with Net connection which is normally through an information facility.

For a lot of personal customers, solitary page organizing is usually enough, though if a reasonably complicated website has been created by the customer, after that a much more thorough package will be needed in order to supply the needed assistance and also application facilities. These will provide the user scope to write or install scripts for extra and suitable applications. Their picked best domain hosting Australia service might likewise provide a control panel for taking care of the web server and the installation of manuscripts, as well as might even offer extra services such as e-mail.

Depending on the dimension as well as nature of your desired size will identify the sort of host solution you will call for. For services, there are a variety of service providers that concentrate on extra complex software application's which are generally used by larger companies within their network facilities. These websites will certainly be linked to the web to enable emails and also data to be sent to various other web sites as well as servers. This additionally allows the individual to update certain locations of the site in regards to services and products to existing and also potential consumers, as well as approving orders online in the form of a shopping website.

By buying a dedicated organizing service, an individual will certainly be offered with a personal internet server and also will certainly be granted complete control of the applications, yet they will certainly not own the hosting. Alternatively, they can buy 'Self managed' or 'Unmanaged' hosting. An unmanaged solution, which is normally the least costly of the dedicated plans, will certainly give the customer will certainly full gain access to in a management capacity, which in turn implies they are accountable for the safety and security and also upkeep of their center.

The option for an internet site owner over a devoted hosting solution is a collocation package. In this circumstances, the user will have the web server and the physical space offered by the holding business that maintains the server. This is thought about to be one of the most powerful yet expensive web hosting solution offered as well as in several circumstances, the collocation carrier may not supply the very same level of consumer assistance one would acquire from various other web hosting solutions.

There are many web hosting service options available for all kinds of individuals, regardless of the level of your internet knowledge, or the nature of your sites' usage. Which one is suitable for you will mostly rely on the applications that you call for. By completing thorough research study into the different types of hosting solutions as well as evaluating the applications that you call for, you can make a big difference to your holding usages, both economically as well as operationally. solution to get a great catch.

Whether you find out about data transfer, after that you have to be extra careful likewise, so that you will not need to pay extra fees whenever you come across with high website traffic mosting likely to your web site. Still the most effective price in picking a host solution commercially is to choose level price.

It indicates regardless of the number of traffic that enters into your site, you still pay same amount monthly. Do not go for a price that is based on number of uses. In choosing web hosting Australia service, it is important to search for things like; what support are they mosting likely to supply? Is it a 24 hour holding support? Is it speed up sufficient? Are they obtaining unreasonable problem for customer service? There are many uncertain points you can experience in the future.

It is constantly useful to prepare ahead of time. If you can locate a company that supplies virtual organizing, the better; Virtual holding enables you to have a domain name of your own, rather than making use of the host's LINK. Make certain also that you can have your very own directory site access.

That is essential in picking a web hosting solution. The directory site gain access to supplies you with unlimited manuscripts. Whether you recognize or know about programs, points will certainly be a great deal much easier for you, but if you are unknown concerning programs, I recommend you pick web base administration.

One thing to pick for is a host that permits you to utilize FTP; this will certainly help you much in helping with uploaded and also downloaded data. Likewise do not ignore your email sources. In some cases you work extra on your emails than the server. It is advantageous to pick host server with POP inbox.

The main course in selecting a host service is for advertising. Putting in banner on your website is extremely important, some, may opt to pop of home windows so you would certainly much better select one that fits to you. Constantly remember that what ever before approach you select, do not forget about FTP gain access to.

Always check for dimension limitation. This is many times is the problem with cost-free web hosting due to the fact that they set a limitation dimension to a file you want to publish and it sift out documents they assume is unrealistic. It is still best in choosing a host solution, one that gives you without constraints.

[avaliveradio]

How to get 10k Streams on Spotify

If you are new to the music biz or even if you have been at this for a while, getting music fans to play you is not easy. Sometimes I’m sure it feels like people are anti-music listeners, especially when you ask them to listen to you.

Take heart, I’ve been working with musicians for over 10 years and I’ve helped to break thousands of songs into the media. What I do know for sure is this doesn’t happen overnight for anyone and you should never give up on an awesome song.

Growing your music streams is not an easy task but it’s worth the effort. If you are an artist who is releasing music consistently, then your efforts will grow in layers. Just never give up on it or you will lose momentum and someone else will slide right into your place with your fans.

Something else you need to know is that quality content matters. If you want to get ahead more quickly, you’ve got to master taking great images that can map your journey on social media and to the press.

Press can only do great things for you if you learn to tell a great story using images, video and text. Our editing team here at AVA Live Radio can help you get all that together and create amazing feature stories for press releasing to an already built following.

I’ve also loved the power of anticipation. Campaigns perform so much better when the artist understands the power of telling the story in the moment. You end up with details that you never remember later documented and wonderful timelines of content that we press agents can pull from.

I think you’ll find that if you get in the habit of documenting what’s happening with you daily to your fans, your relationships get strong quickly and when you do have a music release ready for streaming, people will be ready to hear it.

Apply to playlist curators you know.

Inclusion into some advertised applicable Spotify Playlists can break an artist or a song in front of new music fans. It’s one of the keys to promote your music and have a stronger presence. Our curation team is always looking for new music to update our Spotify Playlists. If you have a track, a new release or an EP that’s perfect for one of them, please submit to your desired Playlist on our Submission page.

To be considered make sure you have followed our playlist, follow us on Spotify and share our playlist with a tag to @AVALiveRadio at least once. Only artists sharing our playlist will be reviewed. We get hundreds of new submissions daily, so be sure to execute this step religiously and make sure we see it if you want your application considered.

Create your own playlist

When you create your own playlist, make sure you add at least 10 qualifying songs that support your track by genre, mood and fan base. A music fan that hears your playlist wants to discover fresh music so take care in curating a solid list. You only get one chance to make a great impression so if the playlist is awesome, that fan will listen to your future recommendations as well.

Be active with your playlist on social media. Remind people when you add something fresh, celebrate the music you add to it. Be creative and manage your own personal playlists around your releases so fans can support you but also learn about music you love and that influences you.  Most importantly, it allows you to trade your tracks with other musicians, share your music and increase your presence : it’s a win-win situation for everyone and best if the musicians share similar fan bases.

BUILD A MUSIC BRAND

Music success is more about brand building than anything else. It’s not enough to have one track take off, you’ve got to have an inventory to back that up or you won’t see any real traction for your hard work and advertising dollars. This includes professional looking photography and video content. Take care in all the content released from your music brand and don’t rush your posting schedule. If you don’t have anything great to share, wait until you do. Your BRAND is only as strong as your latest release.

Having a strong “Brand” image is essential, on your website, streaming sites like Spotify and especially on social media. Everything should match and look cohesive across all your pages. Remember, everything public is considered a showcase for your music and part of your brand identity.

You should also work towards getting verified on Spotify as an Artist.

CONTACT MUSIC BLOGS

Most popular music blogs are completely inaccessible to new artists who haven’t paid their dues yet. Serious music blogs need to feed their audience qualified music news and risk liquidating their reputation if they send out something from a band that doesn’t have their identity in place nor any follow up inventory. I recommend launching several releases and promoting them to music fans on social media before trying to get the attention of all the top curators.

When you do have your brand in order and an Ep or Album launched with some good fan reviews, package that up and apply for Indie Music Spin and AVA Live Radio.

A release on Indie Music Spin will gain a good track anywhere from 5k-25k streams just be posting to their website and newsletter. Typically they work with management teams and labels but you can also submit as an indie artist through the AVA Live Radio Submission page.

A featured page also on the AVA Live Radio website and newsletter can help a track spread quickly from rotation on our broadcasts and social media shares. We also have several playlists that will help you gain notice on the Spotify Algorithm. Posting through the New Music Release Radar program will gain you 10k-25k initial streams over 3 weeks and often 40k-100k streams over 8 weeks if the track is excellent and gets the attention of the other curators in our network.

Radio rotation can be applied for using our New Release Radar page. All applications must be paid in full to get on the network but we guarantee the results if your track is accepted and if you are not accepted, your credit card will not be charged. Apply here:

DEVELOP AN EMAIL LIST

Prior to your release coming out, gather your best pictures and start telling people what you are up to on social media. When you start capturing anyone’s interest ask them to get on your email list to be the first to hear your new release. Be sure to talk about your plan for the release and any milestone goals you are trying to reach. Don’t expect people to jump on board right away if they don’t know you, the average person needs to experience a new musician around 4-8 times before they decide to get on board with you. The key is to be consistent and think about what you stand for. Express your message and offer value to your subscribers. The value and personal content would be things they may miss or can’t get any other way like free downloads, video messages and perhaps Behind the scenes photos with a narrated blog post to go with it.

Find a way to reward new subscribers publicly without revealing their private emails publicly. This could be done on your newsletter or on the social media pages.

Your email list is like gold if you nurture the best and most active fans to it. It can guarantee your views, streams and sales in the future. It just takes time to build.

SHARE YOUR SPOTIFY EVERYWHERE

Don’t be shy once your spotify stream is live. Share it everywhere. Add the link to your descriptions on social, share it on your newsletter, and in messages. It takes time to gain traction so mix it up on social media. Make sure everyone knows about your launch and alternate your posts so they don’t seem repetitive. You’ve got to get creative and appreciate the fact that people need to see variety. Repetitive posts are boring and get ignored so try to get creative with the way you share your posts.

Just look at some of your favorite main stream artist and subtract out the advertising banners for the real content that gets the highest engagement with their fans.

Take a look at how Alicia Keys posts on instagram. There’s a nice mix of professional pictures, music and behind the scenes images. https://www.instagram.com/aliciakeys/

Post Malone also have a terrific social media profile filled with his personality on and off the stage. https://www.instagram.com/postmalone/

BE PATIENT

This takes time so it’s important that you look past just one month on your promotions. Building a fan base and having a hit record takes consistency and time. People need time to learn about you and they need to see you more often. Stay focused on your content production and watch for what resonates with those around you.

WORK WITH A GREAT TEAM If you apply and get invited to work with the AVA Live Radio Network, you’ll be working closely with your own media advisor who will guide you to improving all of the things I’ve listed for you on this guide. You’ll receive a full Pre-release template and release strategy that you can follow to make this easy and efficient. 

You’ll also receive updated information on all results as we proceed through your promotions. This includes tracking how many thousands of streams to your spotify page that our promotions have brought to you. 

PR takes time and effort to execute well but as you know, our team creates professional promotions daily for artists, management and labels all over the world. We look forward to helping you achieve great results.

We have been promoting artists for 10 years, You can Read the FEEDBACK here: https://www.avaliveradio.info/feedback

You can read through our marketing guide for some useful tips and to get to know how we work on these releases in the international press.  More tips for you here.

https://www.avaliveradio.info/jaxdaily/music-marketing-guide

Jacqueline Jax

Entertainment branding and marketing speciality

ENJOY SOME OF OUR PLAYLIST BELOW.

[isearchgoood]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

https://ift.tt/2dty0QU

https://ift.tt/2ZK0LAw

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

https://ift.tt/2dty0QU

https://ift.tt/2Q6PmZy

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger https://ift.tt/39pl2kq #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

[chauhuongtran]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/html-can-do-that-c0n

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/css-can-do-that-18g7m

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas posted first on foogleseo.blogspot.com from https://chauhuongtran.blogspot.com/2019/12/better-site-speed-4-outside-box-ideas.html

[luongthuyvy]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

http://bit.ly/2ZBUrwj

http://bit.ly/39nFeTV

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

http://bit.ly/2ZBUrwj

http://bit.ly/2Fh4Vb7

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas posted first on https://foogleseo.blogspot.com/ #FoogleSEO #luongthuyvy Nguồn: http://bit.ly/364wShX #luongthuyvy

[lyhuynhoanh]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/html-can-do-that-c0n

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/css-can-do-that-18g7m

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas bài đăng bởi foogleseo.blogspot.com from Lý Huỳnh Oanh https://lyhuynhoanh.blogspot.com/2019/12/better-site-speed-4-outside-box-ideas.html

[thanhtuandoan89]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

https://ift.tt/2dty0QU

https://ift.tt/2ZK0LAw

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

https://ift.tt/2dty0QU

https://ift.tt/2Q6PmZy

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[buitatphu]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/html-can-do-that-c0n

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/css-can-do-that-18g7m

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas posted first on https://foogleseo.blogspot.com

[epackingvietnam]

Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything

We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.

This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

JQuery - 101kb

Select2 JavaScript - 24kb

Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

https://ift.tt/2dty0QU

https://ift.tt/2ZK0LAw

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

https://ift.tt/2dty0QU

https://ift.tt/2Q6PmZy

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

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