Blog - KeyCDN

Best CMS Roundup - A Collection of 15 Popular Solutions

The key to attracting and keeping eyes on your website is consistently publishing engaging content. Search engines take notice when you add more text, images, and videos to your website. Of course, juggling all of that content can get chaotic, which is why we have content management systems. According to W3Techs, WordPress, Shopify, and Wix are among the top three most popular CMS platforms with Squarespace coming in at number four.

July 13, 2017 Read more

The Path to Improving Database Performance

Databases are the guts of an application; without them, you're left with just skins and skeletons, which aren't as useful on their own. Therefore, the overall performance of any app is largely dependent on database performance. There are dozens of factors that affect performance including how indexes are used, how queries are structured and how data is modeled. Consequently, making minor adjustments to any of these elements can have a large impact.

July 6, 2017 Read more

Using Google Lighthouse to Enhance Progressive Web Apps

As part of its effort to support progressive web apps, which offer a growing number of complex features, Google created Google Lighthouse to establish standards for today's web. With innovation accelerating at an ever increasing pace, new developers sometimes feel as though they are drifting in the dark when it comes to optimizing their websites. Google Lighthouse hopes to serve as a beacon to guide developers in a direction that is best for all users.

June 29, 2017 Read more

Essential Application Performance Management Tips and Tools

As an application's architecture grows, so does the risk of a component potentially malfunctioning. Working with a massive team of developers and administrators should theoretically ensure a well-oiled machine, but people make mistakes too, so it's helpful to a have automated tools that continually monitor all of the moving parts. That's why we have application performance management tools. What is application performance management? In web development, consistency is key. Application performance management (APM) is what developers do to make sure every user has a consistently positive experience.

June 22, 2017 Read more

TypeScript Tutorial - An Introductory 9 Part Guide

JavaScript's universal browser support and dynamically typed nature makes it an ideal universal web language. However, as any developer who comes from an object-oriented background knows, JavaScript's flexibility can become a liability as applications grow larger and larger. That's why Microsoft created TypeScript to help developers produce better JavaScript utilizing the principles of object-oriented programming. In this article, we're going to go over what exactly TypeScript is as well as show you how to get started in using it.

June 15, 2017 Read more

OOCSS - The Future of Writing CSS

As web projects grow, managing CSS can quickly become challenging if you don't put any forethought into how the code should be structured. Fortunately, some smart developers have come up with several methodologies to help programmers write CSS that is succinct and easy to maintain. Object oriented CSS, or OOCSS, is one such approach that can be applied on its own or combined with other methodologies like BEM to impose order on naturally disordered CSS.

June 8, 2017 Read more

Top 10 Browser Compatibility Testing Tools

When it comes to designing and developing for the web, you will at some point in time inevitably come across a bug, compatibility and or rendering issue, with a browser in which you don't have access to. Even with ever-improving standards support you almost always have to rely on third party tools to diagnose the issue. So today we want to cover the top 10 browser compatibility testing tools which you can use to debug problems and ensure all your visitors are receiving the same experience on your website or application.

June 6, 2017 Read more

9 Best Chrome Extensions for Web Developers

If you're a web developer, you probably spend a lot of time in Chrome. Since it's the most popular web browser with a 44.5% market share, you're liable to constantly use it to preview web pages that you're working on. If Chrome is your default browser, you can make your life easier by using the best Chrome extensions for web development. With Chrome extensions geared towards web developers, you can edit code on the fly, check performance, analyze the tech stack of other websites, and much more.

June 1, 2017 Read more

Progressive Web Apps the Right Way

Since progressive web apps were introduced by Google back in 2015, they have been setting new standards for user experiences. While we are awaiting broader browser support, all developers should start learning how to take advantage of this exciting new way of building apps. In this post, we'll go everything you need to know about progressive web apps including how to make one. What is a progressive web app? The term "progressive" applies not to what an app does but how it's made.

May 25, 2017 Read more

KeyCDN Now Supports Stale-While-Revalidate and Stale-If-Error

KeyCDN is happy to announce that we now support both stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error extension Cache-Control directives. Both of these directives aim to further improve content delivery performance by delivering stale assets to users in the event that assets need to be revalidated or if there is a problem fetching them. Both of these extension directives were introduced in RFC 5861 to provide better control over the use of stale responses from cache headers.

May 18, 2017 Read more