Website analysis: new checkpoints in our test reports

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UPDATE: New checkpoints described in this post are now available on dareboost.com!

Save this date: from June 23rd, new checkpoints will enrich our website quality test. This post aims to introduce you the new checkpoints before being live, so you’ll have time to correct your website (if needed) before our update… Avoiding, by this way, any drop of your DareBoost score!

Frontend SPOF detection for most common providers

A few days ago, we have talked about Frontend SPOF as a real hazard for your website. In a few words, blocking (non asynchronous) third party content (scripts, stylesheet, fonts,…) will slow down the display of your web page and can even totally block it in the case of failure of the content provider.

A quick analysis based on thousands websites tested with DareBoost showed us that more than 50% of these websites are concerned with such a risk. As reminded in our post with major failure examples, that risk is not  theoretical at all.
So our service detects if you are using blocking material from one of these providers:

  • googleapis.com
  • code.jquery.com
  • use.typekit.net
  • maxcdn.bootstrapcdn

As usual, if we detect an issue, you’ll be provided with comprehensive advice allowing you to fix it promptly. We will fulfill this list through time, do not hesitate to let us know your expectations.

Hidden images detection

Responsive Web Design is now the norm, however there are a lot of websites loading 2 versions (or more) of a same image and simply hiding the unused version thanks to a media query. Whereas the design might look great, this mechanism is awful from a performance point of view.

Conditional loading of images was indeed complex when RWD was at its early stages, but today, srcset attribute support is widely enabled.

Of course,  there are numerous other cases of useless image loading (or loading too early) with an initial hidden state. Dareboost find them all analyzing your page so you can speed it up!

Slow Server Response Time for WordPress and PrestaShop

For now, the results of our website speed test conducting while analyzing your pages was not taken into account in our advice, in order to avoid random changes on your score due to temporary network matters.

We have decided to make an exception for WordPress and Prestashop CMS (and more to come), as numerous analyses conducted with our tool show awful server response times due to misconfigured CMS or lack of server-side caching.

Dareboost is about to add an advice dedicated to server response time, when they are significatively slow, in order to make sure the issue is given the required priority in our users’ todolist, but also to  give customized  help according to the used CMS.

HTTPs is a requirement

If you are used to read this blog, we may already know it, HTTPs usage become more and more unavoidable. For your users’ safety first, for the SEO boost to be expected too, but also because there are more and more features that are not available over non secure HTTP. That’s for instance the case of  the Geolocation API with Chrome, since version 50.

Moreover, the Let’s Encrypt project now allows anyone to get a certificate for free.
So we have decided to raise the penalization related to the HTTPs checkpoint, as today websites that can really deal without HTTPs are a minority.

Lazyloading and images scaling: significant improvements

For now, our tip about lazyloading usage recommendation was not robust enough, as it was only based on a threshold of the number of images loaded initially. The tip become more reliable, as we now only look after images that are below the fold. Testing your website on both mobile and desktop contexts is a really good idea, as the fold is of course related to the viewport.

About the images still, our checkpoint about correctly scaling them is evolving too. We now are able to detect images resized using CSS (previously it was only based on with/height attributes of img tag). So, do not forget to scale your files properly!

That’s all for today!  this update is now live since thursday 23th of June. All of our users got an email that very same day, and our customers using our monitoring features got an appropriate message with potential email alerts that would be triggered due to a score change.

Now it’s time for you  to launch a new analysis on DareBoost to test your website with these new checkpoints!

As always, questions and feedback are welcome!


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