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November 2, 2017 — The Vary HTTP header is sent in billions of HTTP responses every day. But its use has never fulfilled its original vision, and many developers misunderstand what it does or don’t even realize that their web server is sending it. With the coming of the Client Hints, Variants and Key specifications, varied responses are getting a fresh start. Read more…

May 27, 2016 — Editor’s Note: Today marks a special day for WordPress. Powering many websites (and yes, Smashing Magazine is one of them), it celebrates its 13th birthday today. Happy birthday, dear WordPress! Here’s to many more! Do you remember when you could run a “fast” WordPress website with just an Apache server and PHP? Yeah, those were the days! Things were a lot less complicated back then. Now, everything has to load lightning-fast! Visitors don’t have the same expectations about loading times as they used to. A slow website can have serious implications for you or your client. Read more…

May 18, 2016 — Varnish Cache is an open source HTTP accelerator that is used for speeding up the content delivery of the world’s top content-heavy dynamic websites. However, the performance or speed a newcomer to Varnish Cache can expect from its deployment can be quite nebulous. This is true for users at both extremes of the spectrum: from those who play with its source code to create more complex features to those who set up Varnish Cache using the default settings. Read more…

September 17, 2015 — The web is moving toward using HTTPS encryption by default. This move has been encouraged by Google, which announced that HTTPS would be a ranking signal. However, moving your website to HTTPS is good for other reasons, too. Rather than debate those reasons, this article assumes you have already decided to move to HTTPS. We’ll walk through how to move your website to HTTPS, taking advantage of Varnish Cache. Read more…

March 21, 2014 — If you’ve searched recently for tips on optimizing WordPress’ performance, then you have definitely come across various techniques that people recommend. Read more…

December 4, 2013 — Imagine that you have just written a post on your blog, tweeted about it and watched it get retweeted by some popular Twitter users, sending hundreds of people to your blog at once. Your excitement at seeing so many visitors talk about your post turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown. Read more…