speed Archives - Daniel Meola

Site Performance Testing

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 16:12:46 +0000

There are a number of tools that can help you to optimize your website for speed. They will do the analysis and make suggestions for improving your site’s performance.

webpagetest.org

PageSpeed Insights

Pingdom Tools

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Cloudflare

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:43:04 +0000

Supercharge your website in five minutes with this incredible service. With roots in web security, this company employs incredibly smart coders that understand networking, security, and speed. Cloudflare is a CDN, optimizer, security service, and analytics software rolled into one, and rolled out for free. They have …

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SpriteCow

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:16:24 +0000

Reducing HTTP requests during your site’s page load is key to improving performance. By combining multiple images into a single sprite, you are loading all of those images onto the client’s browser in a single request. If you are already on HTTP2 you can disregard this performance tip. For the rest of you, read on!

The trick is then to use css to display the appropriate image within that sprite. This is typically done by setting the sprite as the background image, along with a width and height. The key is then to find the offset of the image you want, which can be difficult even with Photoshop, particularly when the image is not rectangular. As a result, sprites are often not utilized because of the extra effort needed to position each background image.

SpriteCow allows you to upload your sprite, and select images within the sprite for which you need positions and sizes. It will automatically select the boundaries of the image you click, or allow you to select a group of images (useful for separate letters in a word). It then gives you sample css:

.sprite {
background: url('imgs/example.png') no-repeat -433px -51px;
width: 33px;
height: 33px;
}

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