Speeding Up Your Website’s Database

Website speed has always been a big issue, and it has become even more important since April 2010, when Google decided to use it in search rankings. However, the focus of the discussion is generally on minimizing file sizes, improving server settings and optimizing CSS and Javascript.

The discussion glosses over another important factor: the speed with which your pages are actually put together on your server. Most big modern websites store their information in a database and use a language such as PHP or ASP to extract it, turn it into HTML and send it to the Web browser.

So, even if you get your home page down to 1.5 seconds (Google’s threshold for being considered a “fast” website), you can still frustrate customers if your search page takes too much time to respond, or if the product pages load quickly but the “Customer reviews” delay for several seconds.

What You Need To Know About Behavioral CSS

As we move forward with the Web and browsers become capable of rendering more advanced code, we gradually get closer to the goal of universal standards across all platforms and computers. Not only will we have to spend less time making sure our box model looks right in IE6, but we create an atmosphere ripe for innovation and free of hacks and heavy front-end scripting.

The Web is an extremely adaptive environment and is surrounded by a collaborative community with a wealth of knowledge to share. If we collectively want to be able to have rounded corners², we make it happen. If we want to have multiple background images³, we make it happen. If we want border images⁴, we make that happen, too. So desire is not the issue. If it was, we would all still be using tables to lay out our pages and using heavy over-the-top code. We all know that anything can be done on the Web.

Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do

Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation.

In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.

Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.

What To Do When Your Website Goes Down

Have you ever heard a colleague answer the phone like this: “Good afterno… Yes… What? Completely?… When did it go down?… Really, that long?… We’ll look into it right away… Yes, I understand… Of course… Okay, speak to you soon… Bye.” The call may have been followed by some cheesy ’80s rock ballad coming from the speaker phone, interrupted by “Thank you for holding. You are now caller number 126 in the queue.” That’s your boss calling the hosting company’s 24 hour “technical support” line.

An important website has gone down, and sooner or later, heads will turn to the Web development corner of the office, where you are sitting quietly, minding your own business, regretting that you ever mentioned “Linux” on your CV. You need to take action. Your company needs you. Your client needs you. Here’s what to do.

Cross-Browser Testing: A Detailed Review Of Tools And Services

As you probably know, cross-browser testing is an important part of any developer’s routine. As the number of browsers increase, and they certainly have in recent years, the need for automatic tools that can assist us in the process becomes ever greater. In this article, we present an overview of different cross-browser testing applications and services. Surely, you are already familiar with some of them, and you may have even stumbled across another overview article, but this one takes a different approach.

This is not just a list of available tools, but rather a comprehensive analysis based on my experience with each of them. For the impatient among you, a summary table is at the end summarizing key metrics and unique features for each service. But if you’re interested in my personal experience with these tools, then read on.

Probably the most important metric of these services is the capture delay, which I measured for the URL stackoverflow¹, with the following browsers enabled: Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari.