webperf - KeyCDN

WordPress Performance - Breaking It down by HTTP Requests

WordPress can be a tricky beast as they say when it comes to web performance. Especially if you are comparing it against others running static sites. Because WordPress is based on PHP and most of the content is dynamically generated, it means you need to find other ways to optimize. In today's post, we are going to dive into a fresh WordPress install and take it apart piece by piece, or rather by HTTP requests, to hopefully help you gain a better understanding of WordPress performance.

October 13, 2016 Read more

Why Use a CDN? Here Are 10 Data-Driven Reasons

Perhaps not to anyone's surprise, but here at KeyCDN, one of the most frequently asked questions we get from visitors is "Why Use a CDN?" A CDN has a lot of other advantages besides simply speeding up your content delivery. Today we want to dive more in-depth into answering that question and share with you 10 data-driven reasons why you should be using a content delivery network (CDN) if you aren't already and how it can help your website stay ahead of the competition.

September 15, 2016 Read more

Perceived Performance - Don't Forget the User

Typically when it comes to web performance, speed is everything. We usually recommend not obsessing over GTmetrix, PageSpeed, or Pingdom scores that much and instead focusing on how fast your website is loading. However, one exception to that rule is that you also need to consider perceived performance. In today's post, we will explore why perceived performance can be crucial to your website's success and the best overall experience for your visitors.

September 1, 2016 Read more

Waterfall Analysis - Diving into Your Website's Requests

Analyzing website performance is something we do on a daily basis here at KeyCDN. One way we benchmark and troubleshoot slowness is by diving into the website's individual requests and doing what we like to call a waterfall analysis. There are numerous tools out there like Chrome DevTools, WebPageTest, and Pingdom which will generate a waterfall chart of your website. Understanding how they work can help you to better pinpoint performance issues as they provide valuable insights about how specific assets affect your page speed and the user experience.

June 23, 2016 Read more

Setting and Calculating a Web Performance Budget

When it comes to web performance, it's always a give and take game. Do you really need that script or third party asset, and if so, what purpose or functionality does it serve? Is it something you can live without? There is always a good balance that must be found between performance, functionality, UX, and design. That is why it is important to calculate and set what we call a web performance budget and try to stick to it as close as possible.

June 16, 2016 Read more

How to Make a Favicon Small and Cacheable

Today we want to talk about your favicon and how to make a favicon small, cacheable, and fast. This is definitely one of those optimizations that can be classified as lower priority, but everything adds up over time when it comes to web performance. If you add up 20 small optimizations, suddenly you could be looking at seconds shaved off your load times. As a CDN provider, we love sharing even the smallest of tricks that can help you stay ahead of your competition and ensure your sites load as fast as possible for both your visitors and Google.

June 2, 2016 Read more

KeyCDN Enables HTTP/2 HPACK Compression - Huffman Encoding

KeyCDN is excited to announce that we have enabled HPACK compression, which utilizes Huffman encoding, for all of you who are running over HTTPS on HTTP/2. This is now running on all of our edge servers and there is no configuration necessary on your part. HPACK compression reduces the size of your headers by over 30% on average. There is less data now being sent which in turn will increase your content delivery speeds.

April 14, 2016 Read more

Fastest CDN - Checklist to Find the Best CDN Solution

Many people are always looking for the fastest CDN (content delivery network). After all, that is a big part of what a good content delivery solution is all about. However, the fastest CDN might not always be the best solution for your business or website. There are a lot of different factors you should consider when shopping for a content delivery solution, speed is definitely one of them, but you also should be looking at a CDN provider's latency, support, pricing, features, and even security.

April 7, 2016 Read more

Resource Hints - What is Preload, Prefetch, and Preconnect?

Today we are going to explore current resource hints and directives which can be another great way to boost the performance on your website or web application. You might have heard of preload, prefetch, and preconnect, but we want to dive deeper into the differences between them how how you can benefit from them. Some of the advantages of these is that they allow web developers to optimize delivery of resources, reduce round trips, and fetch resources to deliver content faster while a user is browsing a page.

March 31, 2016 Read more

How to Improve Your YSlow Score

When it comes to web performance and speed there are many different scoring tools and tests available to aid you in benchmarking your site. Tools such as WebPageTest, Pingdom, and GTmetrix all provide valuable insights into how fast your site loads and what you can do to make it better. Today we want to explore how to improve your YSlow score and applicable steps you can follow today to speed up your website.

March 15, 2016 Read more

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