Last week at MidCamp in Chicago, I presented a session called “Why Your Site Is Slow.”
In this presentation, I review some of the common answers to the question of why a site is slow. Surface-level technical issues like slow queries and redundant JavaScript files are often blamed when a site is slow, although there are numerous factors that can affect performance. In practice, web teams need to ask “why” repeatedly in order to get to the root cause.
Here is how the digital marketing landscape as we know it was formed:
2005: The rise of Google. Suddenly marketers had the power to know which ads worked (and which didn’t), and they could turn off the bad performers and invest in the ones that performed.
2010: The rise of inbound content marketing. Suddenly marketers could create and publish owned content and digital products to drive organic demand.
One of our newer Enterprise customers recently migrated to Pantheon for a number of reasons; they were struggling with slow performance, downtime and lack of Drupal expertise from their existing vendor. One way we address these challenges is through our 30-day Launch Concierge process, available to all new Enterprise customers.
Before we can talk about why to use version control it's important to understand what version control is. In it's simplest form, version control is a system that tracks changes to files over time.
Version control is often used by software developers but is useful for anyone who works with files that are updated over time, especially if there are multiple collaborators.
When we launched Pantheon’s Global CDN back in 2017, we did so to deliver a faster and more secure experience to the hundreds of thousands of sites that rely on Pantheon every single day. As the closest point of contact to end users, the edge offers a unique place to provide essential security and reliable functionality.
Why should web developers care about SEO? It might seem like the very essence of “not my job.” Developers build the site. Content creators fill the site with content. The quality of the content, plus the content creators’ amplification efforts is where SEO lives. Right?
The fact is, though, web developers can do a great deal to increase a site’s search engine visibility. Which means that if we view SEO as someone else’s job, we’re holding content creators—and website performance—back.
There are three stages of SEO:
WordPress is currently changing a lot in terms of how we develop for it. The new “Gutenberg” editor is built using React. React is a very popular framework for building component-based interfaces that encourages us to develop our applications in reusable pieces. This is part of a larger trend in web application development - we are moving from building one large, monolithic app to developing collections of services.
This week I had the opportunity to ride along with Patrick Rauland on Pantheon’s first WooCommerce webinar focused on best practices of building WooCommerce sites. We covered security, PCI compliance, optimization, and a QA checklist for developers. This post shares the highlights in case you missed it. If you want the full details, check out the recording.
We chose to standardize on MariaDB as the datastore to power over 100,000 Drupal and WordPress websites. To do this, we manage almost 275,000 individual database containers. Choosing our database technology is not something we take lightly. These databases aren’t just sitting around; the platform averages over 100,000 MariaDB queries per second every day, answering a total of over 260 billion queries over the lifetime of the currently running containers (some have been running for hours, others for months).
Thanks to everyone who came to see me and Howard Tyson of Zivtech present our session on ElasticSearch at Drupalcon LA. We decided to nerd out, both doing our slides in code with Bespoke.js and focusing on getting