Tezify Blog

Babel & Webpack Fundamentals

This post is about the fundamentals of Babel, Webpack and all things related. This is to help us understand how the frontend code we write ends up being executed when visitors use our web-app. Better understanding of this shall, hopefully, help us write better (and faster) web-apps.

RxJS Observables for Angular Programming: What Problem Do They Solve?

RxJS Observables and operators can look non-intuitive at the first look. But, Angular uses RxJS Observables as part of it's core features and also as part of it's Forms and HTTP APIs. This post details why do we need RxJS Observables and what problem do they solve for a UI framework like Angular.

How We Overcame the Speed Impact of Anti-flicker Snippet (A Case Study)

The marketing team at one of our clients wanted to undertake A/B tests for their landing pages without needing any intervention from the tech team. As they started the A/B tests, we observed that the landing pages under experiment experienced a speed degradation. We then set on course to achieve a solution to address the speed degradation.

What is Virtual DOM and What Problem Does it Solve?

Why do some frameworks (like React & Vue) use Virtual DOM? What problem does it solve? Does it make rendering to the UI faster or slower? The goal of this post is to answer these questions minus all the jargon.

Express Fundamentals (minus the jargon)

This post answers the following questions with respect to Express: What problem does Express solve? Why does it exist? When to use it? And, what is it good for? The goal is understand Express minus all the jargon & buzzwords.

Evaluating Google AMP for Your Website - Benefits & Challenges

This post details the potential benefits (from site traffic perspective) of setting up Google AMP for your site. It also analyzes what it takes to implement & maintain Google AMP pages. There's also a recommended approach to start Google AMP adoption (keeping the gains versus effort in consideration). Over-all, the goal of the post is to help make sure the cost vs benefit analysis is in place while considering AMP adoption.

SEO Impact of Lazy Loading Images

Lazy loading images helps improve website speed. It is especially critical for pages with pagination or infinite scrolling. That stated, it is important to ensure the images lazy loading solution does not negatively affect the indexability of those images. This blog post evaluates these considerations and suggests a solution that reliably covers all bases.

The Speed Cost of Serving Critical Assets from Multiple Origins

When the browser has to request critical resources from different origins to load your web page, it has to first setup a connection with each of these origins. Since the time to setup a connection is latency dependent, setting up multiple such connections may collectively take multiple seconds on mobile networks. This post details how to measure and address this to load your web pages faster.

Improving HTML First Byte Time with CDN Caching

An ideal way to address server side slowness is to root cause infrastructural, code, config or database issue. But lack of time, resources or expertise often causes one to evaluate caching the entire HTML.

How to Accurately Measure Your PageSpeed Score

Well, can’t we just go to PageSpeed Insights or web.dev measure, slap our dear URL and know the scores? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘No’. Read on to know

Invalidating Varnish Cache Without Performance Impact

This post details how you can invalidate or refresh Varnish cache without performance impact during cache invalidation for high traffic websites.

A brain dump of things you can do to load React apps faster

This post captures the approach I follow when improving React apps performance. It also covers the kind of things one can do to optimize React apps performance - tree shaking, code splitting, vendor bundling, etc.

HTTP/2 Server Push Gotchas

With HTTP/2 server push, one can send critical assets to the browser as early as possible to speeden page rendering. This combines benefit of code-inlining and HTTP caching. But, so far, I haven't been able to leverage HTTP/2 server push for any of my frontend optimization work. This is because of the multiple gotchas that come in the way of gaining from it.

Are third party snippets affecting your website speed?

The ease of adding third-party snippets for analytics, advertising or marketing to our website enables us to frequently add new features without tech team's intervention. A side-effect of this plug-and-play ease is that we often end up with far too many third-party snippets negatively affecting our website's speed. This post highlights how third-party scripts are affecting speed of some of the major ecommerce sites and how you can ensure this doesn't happen for your website.

Speed Impact of India's Disparate Browser Market Share

The composition of India's browser market share is notably different from the global share. A side effect of this disparity is that many common web standards and features may not benefit visitors using these browsers popular only in India. As website owner, you may be left blindspotted.. (contd)

Maximizing Speed Improvement Gains : Let Your Marketing Metrics Guide You

There are always many options available to improve website speed - caching, compression and font-loading to name a few. But, how do you know which optimizations would give you the biggest bang for the buck? This post details how your website analytics can help you know the optimizations that will improve the speed experience of our visitors the most.

Will Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Address Your Website Speed Issues?

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) help make your website more reliable, engaging and fast. But, it is important to understand the kind of speed benefits they offer to know if they address the speed issues you seek to overcome. This post analyzes the speed benefits of PWAs to help you make an informed decision in your speed optimization journey.

To AMP or Not to AMP Your Website

AMP definitely improves the speed experience of mobile visitors coming from Google search. But, going the AMP way could mean handing over a discomforting amount of your website control into the search giant's hands. Let us try to understand

Looking Beyond Page Load Time : 5 Examples

Before starting to track and optimize page load times, it is critical to know if your website's page load timings represent your website's speed experience. If not, you may be tracking and optimizing the wrong thing. In this post, we try to dive deeper into this point by looking at five well-known websites.

Synthetic vs Real User Monitoring : What to use when?

Synthetic testing involves making requests artificially in a controlled environment to detect changes or regression in your site's speed. Real user monitoring measures the speed experienced by your users. It helps you identify where to spend time optimizing. In this post, we look at the questions you must ask yourselves to know what kind of monitoring you need.

Tracking Site Speed with Google Analytics : Picking the right speed metric

Google Analytics provides many Speed metrics out-of-the-box. In this post, we help you find the single metric that you can use to track your users' speed experience.

Do Third Party Trackers Affect Your Site Speed?

Learn how to find out if third party trackers affect your Site's Speed. And, if they do, what can you do about it.

Averages in Web Analytics : They hide more than they reveal

Averages are everywhere. They are easy to calculate and you get a single number to put across your point. But using them in places like Web Analytics that demand further scrutiny causes averages to hide more than what they reveal. We look at how we can avoid being blinded by averages when looking for analytical insights.

Hazel-eyed visitors are more likely to buy your product : Insight or illusion? - II

In this second post on the subject, we try to understand all that we need to know before feeding in the numbers from our experiments into a calculator to find the P-value for our experiments.

Hazel-eyed visitors are more likely to buy your product : Insight or illusion?

Is your latest Analytics insight a real signal or random noise? We try to understand how Statistical Significance can help us answer this question.

Latency : The Silent Speed Killer

We all live in an era of always improving bandwidths (with 3G, 4G, 5G networks and so on). But latency can make your site crawl even on these networks. To understand why, let us try to understand latency minus any technology jargon. While talking about Pizzas.

Leading Indian Travel Aggregators : A speed showdown

With the right optimizations in place, we can cater to our visitors coming from slower networks and devices. We understand all that. But how about if we can see how these optimizations make a site's loading experience look like. In this post, we'll do that by seeing how the homepage for three leading Indian travel aggregator sites load up. On a fast and a slow network. The goal is to feel the impact of optimizations. Especially on slower devices and networks.

Visitors on slower networks & devices : What can we do about them?

Not every visitor of our site accesses it from blazing fast network and device. What can we do about our visitors using patchy networks and slower devices? How can we optimize our site for these visitors? How can we minimize the loss from slowness in such situations?

Site Speed : The always running A/B Test

A quick look at Google Trends for the term a/b testing shows a growing interest on this subject over the years. Perhaps, with so many companies joining the fray to offer A/B testing products, we hardly need Google Trends to sense the rush. But, what has A/B testing got to do with Site Speed?

Measuring the Business Impact of Site Speed

Before jumping into the topic, a little bit of background. I'm a techie who has worked on software speed for a decade. Trying to get software to run faster, I have often wondered how fast my site needs to run? Ofcourse, faster the better. But in a constrained world of effort versus gain, is it alright if it loads in five seconds and not three? Or two? What am I leaving on the table by not making it load faster?