Articles

How to Start an Infrastructure as Code Project

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has been a trend for many years. While some standards are being defined today, we continue to hear about new methods or tools to improve and make our lives easier by automating our daily tasks as much as possible.

Fortunately or unfortunately, today, we have the choice between multiple automation tools like Ansible, Pulumi, Terraform, etc, each one having its own benefits and disadvantages. Thus, choosing the right tool is not the easiest part. It requires a team collaboration to identify, test, and define the right tool. This collaboration is the key to success, it is important to ensure the engagement of the other teams to the IaC project to properly automate the process of each team.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

1 novembre 2021/par Service comm.

3 Essential Design Trends, November 2021

Actualités, Actualités

As the year begins to wind down, there are still plenty of new and evolving website design trends going strong. Much of what you’ll see this month carries over from things we’ve been seeing all year but with fresh touches.

From peek-a-boo designs with neat animated elements to vertical bars to brutalist blocks, there are a lot of highly usable trends to work with.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

Peek-a-Boo with Animation

Designers have been experimenting with cut-out and layering elements with animation for some time, which has evolved into full peek-a-boo styles with a lot of visual interest.

How each design comes together is a little different. Some have the animation in the back, others in the front, and some include text as part of the style. There’s almost no set of actual rules to how to make this design trend work.

Each of the examples below does it somewhat differently with varying degrees of success. The commonality here is that it is almost one of those visuals that you either see and love or hate.

Jatco Insurance is the most stunning example here, with a bold color choice and a peek-a-book element inside the oversized “J.” The overall effect is soothing and interesting and naturally draws the user across the screen from the top left to the background video layer. The small tagline, “Individual attention you deserve,” is perfectly placed.

Liron Moran Interiors takes a different approach with the peek-a-boo concept with the letters peeking out from behind an image. The animation is restricted to a hover and scroll effect that adds a liquid element to the image as well as changes to the image and color background. The challenge here is in readability. More of the words show on wider screens, but is it enough?

Melon Fashion also layers text and animated effects for a neat peek-a-book style that almost seems cut out from the background. The overall look appears to have three layers: background video, middle layer for the yellow color block, and text on top. The opacity of text elements with the peeking video is interesting and well pulled together without sacrificing too much readability.

Vertical Bars

Vertical color bars are a design element that keeps popping up in different ways. Designers can use it as a standalone element or container for content, such as navigation or other click actions.

Vertical elements are helpful because they can help create a more consistent and unified user experience from desktop to mobile screens. This shape can also be somewhat disruptive because you don’t see it featured that often. (Although with this style trending that might become less true over time.)

New Classrooms uses a vertical color bar on the left to help you move through the design. The color actually changes as each slide progresses on the homepage.

Serving uses multiple vertical bars as links to different content entry points. Clickability is emphasized with a change from a red overlay to a full-color image. The navigation is also tucked inside a white bar on the left side of the screen with a hamburger menu therein.

TechnoAlpin goes with a skinny vertical navigation menu on the right side of the screen. The icons with menu elements make navigation highly visual and intuitive. The color, which significantly contrasts with the rest of the design, also helps.

Brutalist Blocks

Not many people thought brutalism would stick around when it started trending. Elements of brutalism keep sneaking in, though, although they are much less stark and harsh than some of those original trending website designs.

This version of brutalism focuses on block elements that contain images or text and often click to other pages in the design. The blocks themselves are essentially the buttons that help you navigate to additional content.

The critical question about this design technique is whether this click action is intuitive enough. Will users interact without buttons?

The answer likely depends on your audience base, but if you opt for a style like this, it is essential to keep a close eye on analytics to ensure that users know and understand how to engage.

Milli Agency might be the most intuitive example of the brutalist blocks trend. The homepage is essentially a giant navigation menu. Each block changes from white to yellow on hover and expands, further encouraging clicks.

Sick Agency uses brutalist blocks with experimental typefaces and bold color for an in-your-face design. You can’t help but look at all the different things happening here. The biggest question might be, where should you focus and click next? The cursor provides some visual cues, but it’s not quite as intuitive as you might want it to be.

Mawo mixes brutalist blocks with a big blue cursor to help users click through the design to see more clothing options. Even the images here have a rather stark feel, which isn’t typical for e-commerce. Every block element above the scroll on the homepage includes a click action from the navigation blocks across the top to the “Shop Women” and “Shop Men” images. Further, the blue cursor dot helps show where users can click, and text buttons change to blue on hover as well.

Conclusion

Most of the examples here show trends as homepage elements, but you aren’t limited to that application. Try some of these techniques on landing pages or interior pages that you want to add a little something special to.

This can be an excellent way to test the design and see if your users like the style and know-how to interact with it. If it works, then you can extend the aesthetic to more of the design.

Source

The post 3 Essential Design Trends, November 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

1 novembre 2021/par Service comm.

How to Perform a NestJS TypeORM Transaction Using QueryRunner?

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

In this post, we will look at how to perform a NestJS TypeORM Transaction using the TypeORM QueryRunner class. This is also the recommended way of handling transactions in NestJS.

If you are new to using TypeORM with NestJS, refer to this detailed post about NestJS TypeORM Integration.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

1 novembre 2021/par Service comm.

Popular Design News of the Week: October 25, 2021 – October 31, 2021

Actualités, Actualités

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

Supercharge Your Node.js With Rust

Icon Trends in 2021

Material Design 3

5 Pillars of Effective Landing Page Design

Can Include (a Certain HTML Element Within Another Certain HTML Element)

Is Photoshop & Illustrator in the Web the Most Exciting Reveal of Adobe MAX?

Box Shadow Generator – Generate Multilayer CSS3 Box Shadows

Olio – Illustration Constructor with 130+ Characters and Objects

The Button Cheat Sheet

Marvel Character or Font?

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

31 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

Hazelcast + Kibana: Best Buddies for Exploring and Visualizing Data

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

A lot, if not all, of data science projects, require some data visualization front-end to display the results for humans to analyze. Python seems to boast the most potent libraries, but do not lose hope if you’re a Java developer (or if you’re proficient in another language as well). In this post, I will describe how you can benefit from such a data visualization front-end without writing a single line of code.

The Use Case: Changes From Wikipedia

I infer that you are already familiar with Wikipedia. If you are not, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia curated by the community. In their own words:

Source de l’article sur DZONE

31 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

How To Improve Mobile Application Performance Through Cloud Integration

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

Mobile application development has increased tenfold due to the high demand for such digital platforms among users worldwide. According to a report, there are more than 3 billion mobile application users, and this is where most businesses are looking to capitalize.

Mobile application software helps businesses engage users on mobile devices, making it an attractive investment. Mobile applications offer higher engagement value for organizations, but they also help organizations generate more leads.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

29 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

Facebook Goes All Meta

Actualités, Actualités

It’s almost Halloween, so we were all expecting the odd scare, but little could have prepared us for the blood-chilling horror of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘acting’ amazed in front of a green-screened mockup of The Metaverse, during his keynote at the company’s Connect event.

Zuckerberg — or The Zuckster, as I imagine he introduces himself when arriving uninvited to your birthday drinks — was in the process of announcing that the company formally known as Facebook would from now on be known simply as Meta.

Facebook, the social network, will remain Facebook, but it will be one product among many. Or, as The Zuckster clearly hopes, one among all.

With the new name comes a new visual identity, one so bland that I need to go full-on Clockwork Orange just to critique it. Eyes pinned open, you’ll see an elongated infinity wave in an inoffensive tech-blue gradient and a generic geometric sans logotype. You could throw $5 at a sweat-shop style freelance site and receive a more ambitious, inspiring design than this. It is utterly bland.

If I try really, really hard to find something wrong, I might suggest the M feels a little too large, the single-story a is a little too open compared to the spacing elsewhere, and the wave is a little unbalanced and a little too small. But that is being super-picky because just as there’s little to get excited about, there’s little to be offended by either. It’s a logo fit to adorn a mid-range domestic router.

The Zuckster’s faith in himself as a positive brand ambassador means that he takes full credit for the new direction. The small team involved was reportedly required to sign extensive NDAs, and there’s no credit being given to any external agency.

Of course, it’s very easy to point out what Meta (née Facebook) gets wrong. What it doesn’t get wrong is making money. And this is a sensible business decision from a company that has watched Google extricate itself from algorithm-related ethics allegations with its Alphabet rebrand.

Leaked internal research suggests that Facebook is extremely concerned about its ability to maintain its position in the social media landscape. The app is in sharp decline. It’s no longer the most installed app, and even for those who still have an account, it’s used weekly rather than hourly. Most worrying of all, the average age of its userbase is steadily increasing.

Strategically, it’s a good design direction for Facebook. The most significant benefit is that absolutely none of the insidious, anti-democratic crimes that Facebook has been accused of can be associated with Meta; Meta is a blank slate.

In a press release that echoed The Zuckster’s keynote, Meta notes that it will begin trading under the stock ticker MVRS from December 1, staking a claim as the Metaverse business entity.

The Metaverse — and let’s be clear, this is not The Zuckster’s concept — is a so far ill-defined collection of ideas that will potentially coalesce over the next few years into some form of virtual reality web. It’s almost as if someone over at Facebook HQ said, “If only we could name ourselves ‘Inter,’ then we’d own the whole Internet!” And everyone cheered.

So yes, there is the sickening reality that we’re going to spend the rest of our careers trying to find a less tainted name for metadata. But that’s nothing to the amount of time we’ll devote explaining to future generations that Meta is not The Metaverse.

From now on, I’ll be referring to all Web 3.0 as the Geoverse and see if I can’t revive the fortunes of Geocities. Ah, now there’s a social network worth raising from the dead. Happy Halloween.

Source

The post Facebook Goes All Meta first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

29 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

Qu’est-ce que l’analytique augmentée ?

Actualités, ERP & Applications, SAP

La définition la plus simple de l’analytique augmentée ? C’est une analytique qui est « améliorée » par des technologies d’intelligence artificielle (IA), notamment par le machine learning et le traitement du langage naturel (NLP).

Le machine learning automatise les processus analytiques complexes, comme la préparation des données et la génération d’informations. Le traitement par le langage naturel permet à tout utilisateur, même non formé, de poser des questions sur ses données et d’obtenir des réponses de manière simple sous forme de phrases.

Le terme « Augmented Analytics » a été inventé par Gartner en 2017 et est désormais largement considéré comme l’avenir de la business intelligence (BI) et de l’analyse de données – y compris l’analyse prédictive.

Pourquoi l’analytique augmentée est-elle importante ?

Exploiter les possibilités offertes par le Big Data

Les données représentent la plus grande opportunité de l’économie moderne. Grâce à elles, les entreprises peuvent savoir quoi produire et quand, à qui s’adresser, comment évoluer, et bien plus encore. Mais le volume de données est aujourd’hui trop important pour que les collaborateurs puissent les interpréter seuls – ou sans parti pris – et l’exigence de réponses immédiates est tout simplement impossible à satisfaire. Des technologies comme l’IA et l’apprentissage automatique sont nécessaires pour découvrir des informations significatives dans un océan de Big Data. C’est l’une des raisons pour lesquelles les analyses augmentées sont si importantes : elles combinent la datascience et l’intelligence artificielle pour aider les entreprises à analyser des ensembles de données massifs en temps réel.

Réduire la dépendance à l’égard des data scientists

Le processus d’analyse est une série d’étapes manuelles et chronophages, si compliquées qu’en général seuls les data scientists peuvent les réaliser. Ces analystes professionnels doivent :

Collecter des données à partir de sources multiples
Les préparer pour l’analyse
Effectuer l’analyse
Trouver des insights utiles
Visualiser les résultats
Partager les résultats d’une manière convaincante
Créer un plan d’action

Le problème, c’est qu’il y a une grande pénurie de data scientists dans le monde – et les embaucher coûte cher. Si l’analytique augmentée ne remplace pas ces professionnels, elle peut réduire votre dépendance à leur égard en automatisant des processus tels que la collecte, la préparation, le nettoyage et l’analyse des données.

En plus de libérer le temps des data scientists pour des tâches plus importantes, comme l’interprétation des résultats, l’analytique augmentée peut améliorer la valeur que ces analystes apportent à votre organisation. Les analyses optimisées par l’IA et l’apprentissage automatique les aident à établir des liens qu’ils auraient autrement manqués – et à trouver des informations pertinentes en moins de temps. Ces technologies peuvent également aider des collaborateurs qui occupent d’autres fonctions analytiques – des analystes commerciaux aux analystes métier – en améliorant leurs connaissances et en les aidant à faire le travail qui était auparavant réservé aux data scientists experts.

D’ici 2025, la rareté des data scientists ne sera plus un frein à l’adoption de la science des données et du machine learning dans les organisations.

Gartner, 2018

Démocratiser l’analytique pour les utilisateurs non formés

Une autre raison pour laquelle l’analytique augmentée est si importante est qu’elle permet aux « explorateurs de données » non formés d’entrer en jeu. En automatisant les processus analytiques complexes et en permettant aux utilisateurs d’interroger les données simplement en posant des questions, les collaborateurs qui n’ont pas de compétences en datascience peuvent quand même tirer parti des analyses avancées. L’apprentissage automatique peut guider ces explorateurs de données en leur proposant des questions/réponses pré remplies – et en leur suggérant où creuser davantage.

Avec l’analytique augmentée, les réponses aux requêtes se présentent sous la forme de visuels prêts à l’emploi, comme des diagrammes, des graphiques et des cartes, de sorte que les utilisateurs n’ont pas à les créer eux-mêmes. Ces visualisations peuvent être analysées à l’aide de commandes simples, rassemblées dans des récits de données et facilement partagées avec d’autres équipes et la direction.

L’évolution de l’analytique

L’Analytique et la Business Intelligence ont beaucoup évolué ces dernières années, passant d’outils sophistiqués destinés aux professionnels des données et de l’analyse à des outils optimisés par le machine learning que tout le monde peut utiliser.

1. Analytique traditionnelle

Impulsée par l’IT
Autonomie de l’utilisateur limitée
Des outils sophistiqués pour les professionnels des données et de l’analyse
Se focalise sur le reporting à grande échelle

2. Analytique en libre-service

Impulsée par les métiers
Plus d’autonomie pour les utilisateurs
Interface conviviale
Se focalise sur la découverte par les utilisateurs

3. Analytique augmentée

Impulsée par l’IA et le machine learning
Une véritable autonomie des utilisateurs
Outils d’IA et processus guidés
Se focalise sur des informations rapides, profondes et précédemment cachées.

Avantages de l’analytique augmentée

L’analytique augmentée offre de nombreux avantages similaires à ceux de la business intelligence, comme l’amélioration du reporting et de la prise de décision, mais elle offre également un niveau de rapidité et de précision impossible à atteindre sans intelligence artificielle et apprentissage automatique. Voici quelques avantages spécifiques à l’analytique augmentée :

Préparation plus rapide des données : Les analystes passent environ 80 % de leur temps à préparer les données pour l’analyse. Ils exportent de grands ensembles de données et les combinent, les nettoient et les structurent avant que l’analyse ne puisse commencer. L’apprentissage automatique de l’analytique augmentée automatise ce processus, libérant les analystes pour des activités plus utiles et réduisant les erreurs par la même occasion.
Analyse automatisée : Les modèles d’apprentissage automatique peuvent automatiser des analyses complexes qui, autrement, prendraient des semaines aux data scientists. Les réponses et les visualisations de données sont immédiatement générées et disponibles pour les utilisateurs, qui peuvent ainsi passer moins de temps à creuser dans les données et plus de temps à interpréter les informations, à raconter des histoires de données aux dirigeants et à provoquer le changement.

Libérer la valeur des données : l’analytique augmentée fait le travail pour vous

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Libérer la valeur des données : l'analytique augmentée fait le travail pour vous

Découvrez comment l’analytique augmentée fournit automatiquement des réponses aux requêtes, afin que les utilisateurs passent moins de temps à explorer les données et plus de temps à agir.

Des insights profonds : Les machines peuvent examiner les données d’une manière qui serait impossible pour les humains. Elles peuvent examiner des ensembles de données beaucoup plus vastes sous plus d’angles et trouver des corrélations, des relations -via des modèles statistiques- invisibles à l’œil humain. Les machines peuvent comprendre les données rapidement et à grande échelle, renforcer l’intelligence humaine par des informations impartiales et indiquer aux utilisateurs où porter leur attention.
L’analyse conversationnelle : Le traitement du langage naturel – la même technologie d’IA conversationnelle qui équipe des assistants numériques comme Siri et Alexa – permet aux utilisateurs professionnels n’ayant aucune connaissance des langages de requête ou du code de poser des questions de manière conversationnelle. Et la génération de langage naturel (NLG) leur donne des réponses sous forme de phrases complètes, écrites ou orales, qui résument ou expliquent les résultats.
Contexte instantané : Les informations sans contexte n’ont aucun sens. En tenant compte de l’intention et des comportements des utilisateurs, les algorithmes d’apprentissage automatique peuvent fournir des informations contextuelles prêtes à être utilisées. En outre, en démocratisant l’analytique, les cadres et les employés expérimentés peuvent enrichir les informations grâce à leurs connaissances et à leur compréhension approfondie des business models et des opérations.

Libérer la valeur des données et de l’analytique : la valeur ajoutée de l’analytique augmentée

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Libérer la valeur des données et de l'analytique : la valeur ajoutée de l'analytique augmentée

Hyoun Park, PDG et analyste principal chez Amalgam Insights, explique comment l’analytique augmentée fournit un contexte, afin que vous sachiez réellement ce que vos données contiennent.

Cas d’utilisation de l’analytique augmentée

L’analytique augmentée a le pouvoir de révolutionner les processus d’entreprise, mais à quoi cela ressemble-t-il dans le monde réel ? Voici quelques exemples de cas d’utilisation de l’analytique augmentée dans les domaines de la finance, des ventes et du marketing, de la production, des ressources humaines et du recouvrement.

L’analytique augmentée pour la finance
Un Analyste peut utiliser l’analytique augmentée pour prévoir et contrôler facilement les frais de voyage et de représentation (T&E) dans différents départements.

L’analytique augmentée pour le recouvrement
Les responsables du recouvrement peuvent utiliser l’apprentissage automatique dans l’analytique augmentée pour anticiper les retards de paiement, déterminer la bonne stratégie de recouvrement et maîtriser les flux de trésorerie.

L’analytique augmentée pour les ventes et le marketing
Les équipes de vente et de marketing disposent d’une meilleure connaissance des clients – et d’une identification rapide des opportunités de ventes croisées et incitatives – grâce à l’analytique augmentée.

L’analytique augmentée pour l’industrie manufacturière
Un analyste d’un fabricant d’acier peut utiliser l’analytique augmentée pour prévoir, surveiller et contrôler les dépenses dans différentes usines.

L’analytique augmentée pour les RH
Les responsables RH peuvent prédire le turn-over des collaborateurs, en comprendre les raisons et prendre des mesures correctives pour conserver les meilleurs éléments – tout cela grâce à l’analyse de l’IA.

Découvrez SAP Analytics Cloud

Exploitez la Business Intelligence, l’analytique augmentée et la planification pilotées par l’IA dans une solution unique et facile à utiliser.

The post Qu’est-ce que l’analytique augmentée ? appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

29 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

We Should Write Java Code Differently

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

For the last few years, I’m writing articles that describe a new, more functional way to write Java code. But the question of why we should use this new coding style remains largely unanswered. This article is an attempt to fill this gap.

Just like any other language, Java evolves over time. So does the style in which Java code is written. Code written around Y2K is significantly different from code written after 2004-2006 when Java5 and then Java6 was released. Generics and annotations are so widespread now, that it’s hard to even imagine Java code without them.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

28 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

8 Reasons Your Site Is Slow + How To Fix Them

Actualités, Actualités

1, 2, 3 – That’s exactly how long it takes you to start losing visitors if you have a slow-loading website.

Hold on! Surely, the only thing that matters to users is that your website works flawlessly and looks great… right? Wrong!

The fact of the matter is that we’ve all become accustomed to instant access to information and content. The average internet user today places a lot of value on speed, and the bar is continually being raised.

If you are like most people, you probably feel an immediate sense of dread at the thought of optimizing your website. Where do you start? How can you make the most impactful improvements? What makes your website slow in the first place?

Have no fear, as we’ll be answering all of your questions below as well as putting you on your way to a website that loads with blazing speed.

Why Should You Be Worried About A Slow-Loading Website?

Good question!

As many as 53% of visitors abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Even worse, 1 in 3 shoppers will leave a website if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load.

So, performance plays a huge role in the user experience of your website and whether your visitors will stay on your website or be converted into customers.

For some time, Google has been keenly aware of this fact. As a search engine, Google knows that it’s counterproductive to recommend content to users if they won’t stick around to consume it.

That’s why they’ve continually been increasing the role performance plays when ranking websites for their SERPs (search engine results pages).

In recent years, Google has introduced core web vitals. These are metrics they hope will help quantify how performance affects the user experience. In general, they measure how fast, stable, and interactive a page is while loading. This will be more important than ever after Google announced its Page Experience update, which started its global rollout in June 2021.

As you may know, ranking highly for Google is vital for your website’s visibility. For one, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, of which Google has a 92.7% market share. Even if you manage to land on the coveted first page of Google, the first five results get over 70% of all clicks (28% to the first result alone).

So, to recap why a fast loading website is so desirable:

It directly affects your ability to keep, satisfy, and even convert visitors to your website.
It impacts your search engine rankings which impacts your “findability” and organic traffic.

8 Reasons Your Site Is Slow + How to Fix Them

O.K., so now that we’re all on the same page regarding the importance of your website performance, let’s look at common issues slowing down your website + how to fix them.

1. You’re Using A Sub-Par Hosting Service

As the party responsible for making your website available to the outside world, your hosting service can be a make-or-break factor. Not only should you pick a host that has a good track record when it comes to uptime a performance, but also one that’s suitable according to your needs.

Even if you take all the steps below to optimize your website’s performance, it may still load slowly if traffic to your website is overwhelming your available bandwidth or your host’s server capacity. If that happens, some users may experience extremely slow loading times, broken features, or even complete unavailability.

For most personal, blog, or local/small business sites, a respectable hosting provider like Bluehost or GoDaddy should be good enough. However, if you plan on running any type of large-scale, high-traffic webstore, business portal, or other type of website, you’ll want premium hosting, such as WPEngine (for WordPress), VPS hosting, or even a dedicated server.

2. You’re Not Optimizing Your Media Assets

As you probably know, media like images and videos take up significantly more space than most other types of content, such as text, code, stylesheets, or other static files. Even a single image has the potential of consisting of more data than dozens of website pages containing nothing but the underlying HTML and text.

In a Speed Essentials presentation, the Google team identified images as the largest contributor to page weight. In fact, they have the potential to consume a website’s entire performance budget if left unoptimized. Images can also directly impact all three of Google’s core web vitals – key metrics Google uses to measure the performance of a website.

However, the use of images and video is likely to continue growing, heightening the importance of finding a sustainable solution. According to HTTPArchive, images have increased by 19.3% on desktop and 42.7% on mobile.

For now and the foreseeable future, optimizing your images carries the greatest potential for improving performance.

The problem is that optimizing image assets requires multiple steps. Most importantly:

Using the appropriate next-gen formats which can differ depending on the user’s device, OS, or browser.
Appropriately compressing the size and quality of images to reduce payload without affecting visual quality too badly.
Using the optimal display size and density based on the accessing device to reduce payloads further.
Using lazy loading to only load images as needed.

As you can see, manually going through these steps for every single image on your website can be extremely labor-intensive. This is especially true if you consider that you somehow need to create the optimal variants for different users based on what device, OS, or browser they are using.

In-code strategies, like a JS plugin, responsive images, or CSS media queries tend to bloat your code and lead to other performance issues we’ll discuss below.

Luckily, there are plenty of CDN services available designed specifically for providing some degree of automated image optimization. These platforms analyze the context (i.e., a specific mobile device model, OS version, and browser version) of the user trying to load one of your images and try to serve them a version of the image that’s ideally optimized for them.

However, any media optimization platforms still require installing a small JavaScript plugin to dramatically improve the image and video optimization capabilities.

The one exception here is ImageEngine. ImageEngine uses WURFL device-detection to pick up every possible detail of the user’s device. The logic is built into their device-aware edge servers and doesn’t rely on you adding any additional code or markup to your website pages.

So, not only does it reduce your image payloads by up to 80% and serve them via a global CDN, but it doesn’t leave a footprint in your website’s code. As a bonus, it also happens to support the widest range of image/video formats, including animated GIFs, as well as client hints and save-data mode.

3. Render-Blocking JavaScript And CSS Is Delaying Page Loads

JavaScript is the de facto programming language for adding interactivity and advanced features to websites today. Likewise, CSS is the standard for adding styling. Both are critical components for almost any modern website.

However, nothing good comes free, and both may impact the performance of your website, particularly when used carelessly.

The following are some steps you can take to minimize the impact of these assets on your website performance:

Minify your JavaScript and CSS files.
Combine a large number of JS/CSS files into fewer files.
Replace some of your external JS and CSS files with inline JS/CSS. (Don’t overdo this! Inline JS and CSS is only suitable for small code snippets).
Defer loading JavaScript until after all your content is loaded and use media queries for CSS files.

Because media can have a more significant impact on your page weight, this leads some to believe that adding more JavaScript is the lesser of two evils.

However, depending on whether you already have render-blocking JS, Google might flag this as a completely new issue. Regardless, it will negatively impact your performance score in tools like PageSpeed Insights:

You can avoid it altogether by using an optimization engine like ImageEngine that doesn’t require any JavaScript.

4. You’re Not Using A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is a network of servers spread across various regions all over the globe. What it basically does is store a copy of your website on each of these servers. When an internet user visits your site, the CDN automatically serves your website from the nearest server to that user.

What this does is allow your website to load faster, no matter where in the world people are visiting it from. If your website was only hosted on a single server, say somewhere in the U.S., then it could take much longer to load for a visitor located in Asia than one in the U.S.

While they all basically do the same thing, different CDNs are better at handling different types of content. Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai are just some of the most popular general-purpose CDNs around. Image CDNs like ImageEngine are purpose-built to not only serve image and video assets but to also optimize them using compression, formatting, etc.

So, the two main factors to consider are the type of content you want to deliver via the CDN and its global coverage. However, it’s usually possible to use multiple CDNs in tandem to cover different types of content and reach a wider area.

5. There’s Excessive Overhead In Your Database

If you have a website with any type of complexity, you probably have a corresponding database. In fact, all WordPress websites require a database to function.

Over the years, a lot of information moves in and out of the database. Sometimes, the data can get lost along the way or become obsolete. If you don’t regularly spring-clean your database, then this can really start to add up. Not only will it bloat the storage size of your database, but it will start to impact the speed of database queries and requests.

CMS users are especially prone to racking up these kinds of artifacts from plugins and themes that have been installed and removed over the years.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many easy fixes for this issue available. With most hosting providers, you’ll probably need to use phpMyAdmin to manually check and scrub your data. If you have a managed hosting solution, the host’s support team might be able to help you out. In the event that you have a locally installed database, there are some tools you can use, although they’re not 100% effective.

The best way to avoid any issues is to make database maintenance part of your routine and to learn the basics of how databases work.

6. You Have Too Many Plugins Or Themes Installed

For CMS users, plugins or themes offer near-limitless potential to spruce up the design and functionality of their website. However, each plugin or theme comes with additional code and content that add to the overall complexity and size of your website.

If you have a hand-coded website, the same goes for any additional applets or libraries you want to add to your site.

The best way to combat this is to be conscientious when adding any extras to your website. Only install what you really need or want, and make sure to uninstall and properly remove them if you don’t need them anymore.

As mentioned, they might leave various transients or artifacts behind, so you should keep an eye out for them throughout your website files (not just the database) whenever you do some spring cleaning.

7. You Aren’t Utilizing Caching

Caching is often one of the most effective yet ignored techniques for improving website performance. Caching stores your website content in fast-access memory in the user’s browser, allowing it to be loaded near-instantaneously by users. This can include everything from text to stylesheets to images to JavaScript files.

Without caching, a user will need to redownload everything when they navigate to or reload a page — whether or not anything has changed.

However, not properly configuring caching on your website can lead to issues, such as users only loading out-of-date content. Most high-quality caching tools have built-in features that automatically clear the cache when you make changes to a specific website page or content. So, users will only reload content once it has been modified.

Some hosts offer out-of-the-box caching tools with their hosting service. CMS can also usually find plugins for this, such as WPRocket for WordPress.

8. Ads Are Dragging You Down

In the end, ads are just another form of media that increases the overall weight of your website pages. While they are typically small and lightweight, multiple ad placements can really start to add up.

What aggravates the issue is that ads are loaded from external sources. This means they’ll take longer to render, generate more requests, and may mess with how stable your pages load — affecting your core web vitals.

Depending on how important ads are to your revenue stream, you’ll want to carefully consider how many ads you use on your site, where to position them, and when they load. If possible, avoid loading ads at the same time as the rest of your page, especially interstitials.

Conclusion

As you can see, website performance is a multi-faceted subject. Although some may be worse than others, you can’t just address one area and expect your website to suddenly be performant.

However, some general principles apply:

Keep HTTP requests low by limiting the number of files required for each of your website pages.
Maintain proper code hygiene and spring clean transients and leftover artifacts.
Invest in proper hosting infrastructure as well as a CDN for your website.
Optimize your media assets to significantly bring down payloads without sacrificing engagement.

The final point deserves another shoutout. As we’ve pointed out, finding an optimization solution for your media, particularly images, is probably the best thing you can do to improve your website performance. From purely a performance perspective, there is no service quite as effective as ImageEngine. It’s also the one that requires the least amount of technical expertise and ongoing maintenance.

Regardless, you’ll want to run some tests using tools like PageSpeed Insights so you can gather data on what issues your website is facing. From there, you can prioritize fixes to make your website more competitive.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]

Source

The post 8 Reasons Your Site Is Slow + How To Fix Them first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

28 octobre 2021/par Service comm.