Introducing Aerate: Frontend performance made easy
One of the cornerstones of our development process at Four Kitchens is performance. We believe speed is foundational to creating a great user experience. For this reason, we offer both a suite…
Performance
Spectre and Meltdown CPU Security Holes Performance Impact
What are Spectre and Meltdown? Have you noticed your servers or desktops are running slower than usual? Spectre and Meltdown can affect most devices we use daily. Cloud servers, desktops, laptops, and…
Making WordPress More Performant with Pantheon
We recently rebuilt and refined the design of our own website. Moving from two separate systems in Jekyll and Drupal to all content being in WordPress. We approached this overhaul in stages.…
Making a Performant Photoblog with Lightroom, Jekyll, and Gulp
In middle school, I eagerly sweet-talked my Dad, who still maintains that computers are a fad, into helping me acquire a “domain name.” It was the start of a long journey into…
SEO Best Practices: Fall 2016
Over the past year, we’ve witnessed big changes in search ranking factors. So, if you're looking to realize success with SEO as we head toward the end of 2016, it is imperative…
WebPageTest for power users
Howdy, perfers! This week is short and sweet: a duo of videos for WebPageTest power users. It was presented at Velocity 2014 by Patrick Meenan, the creator of WebPageTest.org. Let me highlight…
Test local development environments with ngrok
Local development is convenient and fast. It rids us of network latency and allows more rapid iteration while building a website. But the latency is not gone; it's simply hidden from the…
Use AdvAgg Information tab to debug or optimize CSS and JS aggregates in Drupal 7
In a previous article about using AdvAgg to inline critical path CSS, I briefly mentioned an optional step to reducing the number of bundles produced by the aggregator. I'd like to walk…
Use Grunt and AdvAgg to inline critical CSS on a Drupal 7 theme
Howdy, perfers! Last week I went through the process of generating critical CSS using Gulp and an npm module called critical. The big caveat is that Critical doesn't currently offer out-of-the-box support…
Use Gulp to automate your critical path CSS
Howdy, perfers! Last week I went over the surprisingly brief process of cutting the fat out of your CSS frameworks with gulp and UnCSS. This week let's take CSS optimization a step…