To be able to modify headers in a testing environment is a great thing to have. It allows control over your application as one can bypass authentication, set cookies, and so on. In this article, Nafees Nehar explores some methods which allow modification of headers in an automation testing setup.
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All webmasters should strive for improving the performance of their website, and increasing their website’s security. If you’re looking for ways to increase your website’s performance and security, Jonas Krummenacher brings you five methods that are great options. Not only are they all relatively easy to implement, but they’ll also modernize your overall stack. Some of these technologies are still in the process of being globally adopted; however, as demand increases, so will compatibility. Thankfully, there are ways to implement some of the technologies for browsers that support them, while falling back to older methods for browsers that do not.
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HTTPS is a must for every website nowadays: Users are looking for the padlock when providing their details; Chrome and Firefox explicitly mark websites that provide forms on pages without HTTPS as being non-secure; it is an SEO ranking factor; and it has a serious impact on privacy in general.
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WordPress is a very robust, easy to use and feature rich content management system (CMS). Everyone from stay at home bloggers to fortune 500 companies rely on it every day. Just like with most platforms, if it isn’t properly used or optimized it can turn into a big headache very quickly. In this article, Brian Jackson has compiled a list of bad web practices and recommendations on what not to do on your site, based on thousands of hours of customer interactions, support tickets, and troubleshooting he experiences on a daily basis. Picking the right web host is very important. But your decision also goes hand-in-hand with educating yourself on how to best optimize your WordPress site.
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In this article, Jeremy Wagner will teach you everything about server push, from how it works to the problems it solves. Server push allows you to send site assets to the user before they’ve even asked for them. It’s an elegant way to achieve the performance benefits of HTTP/1 optimization practices such as inlining, but without the drawbacks that come with that practice. Jeremy will also show you how to use it, how to tell if it’s working, and its impact on performance. Let’s begin!
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These days, understanding cyber-security is not a luxury but rather a necessity for web developers, especially for developers who build consumer-facing applications. In this article, Hagay Lupesko will show you how web developers can use HTTP headers to build secure apps. While the code examples are for Node.js, setting HTTP response headers is supported across all major server-side-rendering platforms and is typically simple to set up.
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For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, Jeremy Wagner will get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and will compare its performance to gzip.
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SSL is the “S” in HTTPS. It adds a layer of encryption to HTTP that ensures that the recipient is actually who they claim to be and that only authorized recipients can decrypt the message to see its contents. In this article, Emerson Loustau will show you how to upgrade your website to HTTPS to improve your website, protect users and participate in the advancement of the Internet. And it won’t cost you anything!
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Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter Quick Tips-kind-of articles — shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team.
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WordPress does make it really easily to completely customize a website. Unfortunately, any modifications made to a theme will be lost once the theme is updated by the developer — which is also bad for security. A much better idea is to use a child theme. This allows you to make any number of changes to a website without touching any of the original theme files. In this article, Nick Schäferhoff will take a detailed look at what WordPress child themes are, how to create them and how to use them to customize your website — the right way.
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