Why you should avoid using document.write, specifically for scripts injection

Web performance testing tools such as Google Page Speed or Dareboost have been advising this for a while: injecting a script with document.write has a significant impact on website loading time. Let’s talk about this topic one more time, as the next Chrome update (version 54) won’t allow such scripts injections any longer. What kind of issues may you experience? What are the alternatives?

Continue reading Why you should avoid using document.write, specifically for scripts injection

Major update announcement: HTTP/2 speed test support and more

Our team is glad to announce today our next major upgrade, planned deployed on 19th September, with a brand-new test probe technology. We’re detailing within this post all the evolutions and improvements. This is one of our biggest update, with amazing news such as HTTP/2 support and much more to discover…

Continue reading Major update announcement: HTTP/2 speed test support and more

Website analysis: new checkpoints in our test reports

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!

Continue reading Website analysis: new checkpoints in our test reports

Website analysis: PDF report (and white label option)

If you’re reading this blog post, you are certainly used to checking your website with Dareboost. It allows you to comply with the latest web best practices and to run advanced speed tests.

And we provide a lot of additional features! For instance, did you know about the PDF export and its white label option?

Let’s detail this feature, which is available for any of our reports (even triggered by our API or by our website speed monitoring feature, but also for our comparison report). Continue reading Website analysis: PDF report (and white label option)

Website Analysis: new checkpoints on Dareboost

UPDATE: Best practices described in this article are now available on dareboost.com!

Mark your calendars! We’re going to add new checkpoints on dareboost.com on Thursday, March 24th. In this article, I propose you to discover in details the changes of this update. So you should be able to correct your web projects before the update and to avoid any score drop on our tool!

Let’s talk about CSS quality, security and accessibility!

Continue reading Website Analysis: new checkpoints on Dareboost

Competitive benchmark and more with Dareboost

You have probably discovered Dareboost through our free website analysis tool. The professional version of Dareboost goes a lot further,  allowing you to monitor the performance of web pages, but also their technical quality.

We have just improved our monitoring features, allowing you to group several monitored web pages together. This way, you can now better organize your dashboard, and visualize the data of several monitored pages within a single graph, but also their general trends!

Several monitor on the same graph

Continue reading Competitive benchmark and more with Dareboost

HTTPs is a requirement for your website

About a year ago, I have published an article about HTTPs usage growth: Chrome, Firefox and Google Search: HTTPS forcing its way. In this article I detailed some major announcements, that would probably result in pushing HTTPs forward.  

Ever since, requests using HTTPs reach 25% according to HttpArchive data (compared to 15% in April 2015).

In this post, we’re going to focus on today’s results of the previous announcements, on the last changes, and especially on why you should consider HTTPs as a requirement for your website (not only for security or SEO considerations!)

Continue reading HTTPs is a requirement for your website

Content Performance Policy: an alternative to Google AMP?

It’s not usual on this blog, but today I’m going to write about a proposal that might become real, but that is still at its very early stage.

It is now more than a year since we added a recommendation about Content Security Policy with our website analysis on dareboost.com. It’s a great feature to add more security to your website, particularly to prevent your visitors from the effects of an XSS attack.   

The idea behind CSP is to allow website owners to offer a security policy that will next be applied by the web browser. For instance, it allows to whitelist explicitly some JavaScript files, or to ensure the use of HTTPs to request each resource within the page.  

Tim Kaldec and Yoav Weiss borrowed the CSP general concept to apply it to web performance topic, proposing a new HTTP header (Content Performance Policy), allowing to declare precisely the compliance level of a given page with some web performance best practices. Then, the user agent would be responsible to ensure the effectiveness of the announced best practices.   Continue reading Content Performance Policy: an alternative to Google AMP?

Website Speed Test, Dareboost tips for reliable results

If you read this blog, you probably know that performance matters to the user experience. Moreover, it’s a major factor that determines the success of a website.

First Byte, Speed Index or Start Render, or even Fully Loaded time, regardless of the metric you want to collect, your measurement method has to consider several major parameters if you want reliable results over time. Continue reading Website Speed Test, Dareboost tips for reliable results

Website analysis: our checkpoints are evolving

Next week, new automated checkpoints will be added on our quality and performance test tool, dareboost.com. The scores of your web pages are therefore likely to evolve.
This update includes new best practices, but also improvements on existing advice!
In this article, I propose you to discover in detail the changes of this coming update.

performance best practices update

Continue reading Website analysis: our checkpoints are evolving

Website Speed and Quality Monitoring with DareBoost

We have completed a major update on dareboost.com, that greatly expands the capabilities of our monitoring features.

We are proud to take the next step and offer a more comprehensive tool, always with the same goal in mind: an easy and new way to manage web performance and quality.

After a brief reminder of the absolute need to monitor your website speed, I’ll detail you the changes coming along with this update.

Continue reading Website Speed and Quality Monitoring with DareBoost

Compare the speed and rendering of 2 pages

More and more of you were asking for it, so we did it :)
Comparison Tests are now available!

  • Would you like to know how your website is doing compared to a competitor, whether it is a challenger or the leader of your market?
  • Would you like to valorize your optimization work by comparing the new version and the old one of your client’s website?
  • Would you like to compare the speed of the mobile and desktop versions of your responsive website?

Continue reading Compare the speed and rendering of 2 pages

Website analysis: new checkpoints

UPDATE: Best practices described in this article are now automated on dareboost.com!

Mark your calendars! We’ll add new checkpoints on dareboost.com during the second half of August.

Many of you have asked us to communicate in advance on this kind of updates, so you can correct your web projects before any score decrease on our tool

Let’s discover together these new checkpoints that will soon be automated on dareboost.com. Continue reading Website analysis: new checkpoints

Performance testing tool: Speedindex, Filmstrip

Some days ago, we talked to you about 3 useful key indicators to measure the rendering performance of your web page: the SpeedIndex, the Visual Complete and the Start Render.

Today, we are pleased to announce you that these indicators have just joined dareboost.com’s performance speed test!
I offer you to make you discover the changes that this new version brought.
Continue reading Performance testing tool: Speedindex, Filmstrip

Securing an iframe thanks to the sandbox attribute

Over time, we have gotten used to integrate more and more content on our web pages. Sometimes these content come from third parties (social networks widgets, advertising, etc). It implies two consequences: the webpages size continues to rise, and we display to the users some content that we can’t fully control.

Some of these external content are integrated via the <iframe> tag, and you should pay special attention to these elements for your website’s security. To limit the risks, the W3C added the sandbox attribute in the HTML5 specifications, allowing to restrict the actions available from an iframe (supported by major recent browsers).

sandbox attribute protects from malicious iframes

Continue reading Securing an iframe thanks to the sandbox attribute