Blog - KeyCDN

Improving Performance with Cache-Control: immutable

Cache-Control is an important HTTP header that allows you to define various directives letting browsers know how an asset should be cached. For example, if an asset has a large max-age, then the asset can be retrieved from the browser for a long period of time without making a request to the server. This means faster load times for the user. We've covered many of the popular directives you can define for the Cache-Control header, however, in this post we're going to cover a Cache-Control extension called immutable to see what kind of impact it can have on performance.

May 11, 2017 Read more

Scalability Testing - A Guide and Checklist

You can build a web application that functions perfectly on your machine, yet if it doesn't scale, a sudden influx of traffic could cripple your whole system. That's why it's important to have measures in place that allow your application to quickly scale in order to handle these spikes in traffic. This guide to scalability testing will help you overcome such growing pains. The importance of scalability Scalability refers to the capacity of a network, system or process to adapt to sudden changes.

May 4, 2017 Read more

Benchmarking Guetzli - Comparing Size vs Optimization Time

Images are one of the biggest contributors to web page size. In fact, according to many web performance experts, reducing image sizes should be your number one priority to help improve overall performance. There are various methods you can use to optimize your images such as using lossy vs lossless compression or converting your images to another format like WebP or SVG. Since optimizing images is an important topic in the web performance world, Google recently released a new way to optimize JPEG images, called Guetzli.

April 27, 2017 Read more

The Pros and Cons of 8 Popular Databases

Databases store information, and its contents can be everything from product catalogs to repositories of customer information. For information to be easy to access, use and understand, database management systems are required. Database management systems can help sort information, link databases to each other, and provide reports about changes and trends in the information in databases. In this post, we'll go over some of the most popular databases currently used and outline the pros and cons of each.

April 20, 2017 Read more

Interview with Stefan Judis - Creator of Performance Tooling Today

Stefan Judis is the creator of Performance Tooling Today, a website that is dedicated to the collection of performance-related resources. Stefan is also involved in other performance and frontend related activities as he is the organizer of the Web Performance Group Berlin, is an occasional teacher and organizer of CSSclasses Berlin, and is a Developer Evangelist at Contentful. Today, we interview Stefan and ask him 8 questions all revolving around the topic of either web performance or web development.

April 13, 2017 Read more

5 Part PHP Cheat Sheet

PHP is perhaps the most popular general purpose scripting language for web developers, but its capabilities extend well beyond building websites. Of course, immense capabilities often come with a steep learning curve. Fortunately, PHP is straightforward enough for coding novices yet powerful enough for professional programmers. Its massive list of features may seem intimidating at first; however, anyone with even very little knowledge of coding should be able to write simple PHP scripts.

April 6, 2017 Read more

A Comprehensive Overview of webpack

As the line between websites and web apps has continued to erode, the possibilities and challenges for developers have subsequently evolved. Since web apps are greatly dependent on JavaScript, the client side is having to handle more and more. One of the best ways to manage the additional load is to use a module system, such as webpack. Module systems make it easier for developers to keep things organized, and they ensure that content is delivered quickly and efficiently to users.

March 30, 2017 Read more

10 Essential Benefits of Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design simply means making websites that can adapt to the size of the visitor's viewport. The goal is for content to render differently depending on the device or screen size so that visitors have an optimal experience no matter how they access a website. The primarily benefit of responsive web design is that sites load quickly without any distortions, so users don't need to manually resize anything to view content.

March 16, 2017 Read more

Choosing a PHP Code Generator - 6 Popular Solutions

PHP code generators are programs that automatically generate code based on settings and parameters that you choose. The benefit of using a code generator is that they can allow you to save time and money. Coding with the purpose of accomplishing a particular task can be done either manually, or in certain cases, through the use a generator. Creating code manually can be time-consuming and result in errors. When a good generator is being used, the code can be created in minutes, and you can be near certain that it will run as intended.

March 9, 2017 Read more

Agile Web Development - Comprehensive Overview

On top of learning how to work with complex software, aspiring web developers need to know how to function as part of a professional team. Software development methodology is its own field of study with a unique lexicon, and one of the most important concepts that budding developers should familiarize themselves with is agile web development. What is agile web development? Agile web development is actually a broad category of methodologies based on the principles outlined in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which was compiled by a team of professional developers in 2001.

March 2, 2017 Read more