Category: Tutorials

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Maintaining Performance

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Real talk from Dave:

I, Dave Rupert, a person who cares about web performance, a person who reads web performance blogs, a person who spends lots of hours trying to keep up on best practices, a person who co-hosts a weekly podcast about making websites and speak with web performance professionals… somehow goofed and added 33 SECONDS to their page load.

This stuff is hard even when you care a lot. The 33 seconds came from font preloading rather than the one-line wonder of font-display.

I also care about making fast websites, but mine aren't winning any speed awards because I'll take practical and maintainable over peak performance any day. (Sorry, world)

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When CSS Blocks

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Tim Kadlec:

One particular pattern [for loading non-critical CSS] I’ve seen is the preload/polyfill pattern. With this approach, you load any stylesheets as preloads instead, and then use their onload events to change them back to a stylesheet once the browser has them ready.

So you're trying to make your stylesheet more async, but it causes two big problems:

  1. You've kicked up the priority of the downloading higher than any other asset.
  2. You've blocked the HTML parser too (because of the polyfill as an inline script).

Firefox does something fancy to avoid problem #2 in this particular case, but it affects every other browser.

I've never had good luck with fancy techniques to trick the browser into theoretically better downloading/rendering patterns. I'm kind of a stylesheets in the head, scripts at the end of the body kinda guy, but I know the web is a complicated place. In fact, in a quick peek, I see that Jetpack is inserting an inline script into my <head>, so that would affect my loading too, except they load it with an obfuscated type until later scripts execute and change it, probably to avoid this exact problem.

Anyway, Tim's advice:

• If you’re using loadCSS with the preload/polyfill pattern, switch to the print stylesheet pattern instead.

• If you have any external stylesheets that you’re loading normally (that is, as a regular stylesheet link), move any and all inline scripts that you can above it in the markup

• Inline your critical CSS for the fastest possible start render times.

The print pattern being:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">

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In-Browser Performance Linting With Feature Policies

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Here’s a neat idea from Tim Kadlec. He uses the Modheader extension to toggle custom headers in his browser. It also lets him see when images are too big and need to be optimized in some way. This is a great way to catch issues like this in a local environment because browsers will throw an error and won’t display them at all!

As Tim mentions, the trick is with the Feature Policy header with the oversized-images policy, and he toggles it on like this:

Feature-Policy: oversized-images ‘none’;

Tim writes:

By default, if you provide the browser an image in a format it supports, it will display it. It even helpful scales those images so they look great, even if you’ve provided a massive file. Because of this, it’s not immediately obvious when you’ve provided an image that is larger than the site needs.

The oversized-images policy tells the browser not to allow any images that are more than some predefined factor of their container size. The recommended default threshold is 2x, but you are able to override that if you would like.

I love this idea of using the browser to do linting work for us! I wonder what other ways we could use the browser to place guard rails around our work to prevent future mistakes...

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Do This to Improve Image Loading on Your Website

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In the video embedded below, Jen Simmons explains how to improve image loading by using width and height attributes. The issue is that there’s a lot of jank when an image is first loaded because an img will naturally have a height of 0 before the image asset has been successfully downloaded by the browser. Then it needs to repaint the page after that which pushes all the content around. I’ve definitely seen this problem a lot on big news websites.

Anyway, Jen is recommending that we should add height and width attributes to images like so:

<img src="dog.png" height="400" width="1000" alt="A cool dog" />

This is because Firefox & Chrome will now take those values into consideration and remove all the jank before the image has loaded, even when you override those values in CSS with a fluid width and thus unknown height. That means content will always stay in the same position, even if the image hasn’t loaded yet. In the past, I’ve worked on a bunch of projects where I’ve placed images lower down the page simply because I want to prevent this sort of jank. I reckon this fixes that problem quite nicely.

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How to turn your WordPress installation into a high selling machine

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Converting WordPress into a high selling machine is not a new thing. Rather, people are using various e-commerce plugins to convert WordPress into a selling machine. However, using plugins is not enough when you want to groom up your WordPress site as a top-flight salesperson. Here in this blog, we will discuss how several off-page […]

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Common WordPress Errors & How to Fix Them

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WordPress is an amazingly stable platform thanks to the dedication and talent of the hundreds of professionals contributing to it, and the strict code standards they follow. Even so, the huge variety of themes, plugins and server environments out there make it difficult to guarantee nothing will ever go wrong. This guide will help you […]


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Four Elements of Truly Mobile-Friendly Responsive Menus

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There are hundreds of ways to create responsive navigation, limited only by your creativity and the boundaries of what CSS can accomplish. Good responsive navigation is a little harder – a responsive menu must become a mobile menu, adhering to the needs and rules of touch-driven devices. Mobile design is rapidly changing, and so the […]


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Level Up Your CSS Skills With These 20 Pro CSS Tips

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Front-end development is quickly becoming more and more focused on efficiency – faster loading and rendering through selector choice and minimizing code. Pre-processors like Less and SCSS go a long way in doing some of the work for us, but there are plenty of ways to write minimal, quick CSS the native way. This guide […]


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Easy CSS Animation With Transition & Transforms

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Recently, I walked you through how to create a simple landing page that used a couple different CSS animation techniques. “Animation” is a loose term, in web design usually referring to anything that involves movement. CSS transitions are one tool we are given to manipulate elements on state changes or mouse events, and when combines […]


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Master CSS Flexbox in 5 Simple Steps

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CSS flexbox is an incredibly useful tool for layout without using floats or positioning. Currently almost all current browser version support flexbox, making it a go-to standard for web design. It can solve a number of problems efficiently, such as vertical alignment, space distribution, ordering of elements and sizing. It offers more freedom to arrange […]


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How to Create Spotify Colorizer Effects With CSS Blend Modes

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When Spotify launched their colorful new brand identity, featuring hip duo-toned imagery, it went hand-in-hand with a new Colorizer tool that allows artists to apply a variety of filters to images. This solved a problem in which Spotify needed a way to present the thousands of images uploaded, all with a different look and feel, […]


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Tutorial: Duo Layout With CSS3 Animations & Transitions (Pt. 2)

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Last week I demonstrated how to build a split-screen website layout using CSS flexbox and viewport units that offers an alternative way to present a brand’s featured content. Clicking on one side or the other navigates further into the site without a page load, using CSS transitions and 3d transforms. This week, I’ll show you […]


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