Chrome, Firefox and Google Search: HTTPS forcing its way

As a reminder, the HTTPS (HTTP Secure) is, as its name indicates, the secure version of the HTTP protocol. The HTTPS aims at assuring confidentiality and security of exchanges: the communication being encoded, the protocol protects from eavesdropping, but also from data alteration.
For several years, its use has been more and more present (April 2015, 7 times more requests than in 2011 are made by HTTPS). Though by the end of the year, we should observe a massive intensification of this trend.

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Red Slow Label: A Strong Sign from Google

For the first time a few days ago, a web user spotted a new feature in his mobile research results: the Red Slow Label. This indicator appears as a red box with “Slow” written in it and located right in front of the result’s URL.

This discovery has aroused a keen interest among the SEO communities and the websites’ editors, I suggest you to learn more accross this article.

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Sales 2015: web performance of e-commerce websites

57% of Internet users consider that a website should be loaded in less than 3 seconds. In addition, according to the FEVAD: “61% of e-buyers (had) the intention to make their purchases on Internet during the winter sales” 2015.

Based on this observation, we took interest in the main French e-commerce sites’ performance, before and during this crucial period.

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Web Performance: Last Trends (August 2014)

Each month, DareBoost relays the figures published by HTTParchive.org and offers you a state of the web. This article deals with the latest data, of August, 1st 2014.

As we are used to doing, we will compare these data, with those of last year (August 2013) and those of last month (read last month’s article), for the top 1 000 most visited websites.

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CSS minification

One web optimization that you can easily set-up, lies in your CSS files. Indeed, in most of the cases it is possible to reduce the weight of your website by minifying your “Cascading Style Sheets”.

This article aims at presenting you the principles of minification, and gives an overview of some popular tools to set this technique up on your website.

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Useful tips to start with WordPress

Nowadays, one of the first steps when you create a website is to adopt a CMS. It allows to save time, so you can deploy a website quickly. According to wappalyzer, more than 60% of the websites using a CMS are powered by WordPress (source: https://www.wappalyzer.com/categories/cms). We ourselves have decided to use WordPress for its simplicity (exceptionally, web performance was not our major criterion!)

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How to improve jQuery performance

You have probably ever heard of best practices to improve your website’s quality and performance (configure a cache policy, enable gzip compression…).
However, web performance doesn’t stop to follow general best practices: each technology has its own specific recommendations. Some mistakes are quite trivial, but some others can be painful for your website. The addition of several minor errors can really slow down your final product. That’s why you should always think about performance upstream and during the development step.

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