OUR BLOG

Website performance is critical to all our clients at Carbon Six Digital, and we work hard to simulate and monitor real world performance during development, then we setup monitoring tools to make sure that we maintain great performance in production. In this article on monitoring website performance for Umbraco HQ our Technical Project Manager Alex discusses some of the tools and techniques we use to ensure that websites we build are highly performant, and stay that way.…

When you’re commissioning a new Umbraco site, it can be useful to start planning for the task of testing what has been delivered by your developers.  A planned and thoughtful approach to User Acceptance Testing can reduce the time taken and ensure better coverage of the system as well as one that is ultimately better at the end. Developing a Strategy for Acceptance Testing  During the early product planning stages, it’s worth discussing acceptance testing to understand the agency’s standard approach. Will they develop the system in an iterative way and expect you to contribute to acceptance testing during…

If you’re going to build a website or app you need to face facts: it’s going to have bugs.  Bugs have existed in software since Grace Murray Hopper found her punch card program failed because a moth got trapped in the reader.   Bugs are a fact of software life, because humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we misunderstand specs, we write algorithms incorrectly, or we use the wrong variable.  We believe that instead of trying to write perfect code, we should spend as much time trying to write a good trap.  Testing, therefore, is the saviour of poorly-written code. Approaches…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Performance is so important for the success of your site, and with Umbraco you have a number of levers to pull to optimise the performance of your site. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve written about how to squeeze better performance out of your Umbraco site, covering in Part 1 image and css/javascript optimisation and in Part 2 caching and database tracing and tuning. In this final part we look at stress testing tools and tuning infrastructure performance. Use a…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Last week we started a series of posts about performance tuning Umbraco sites, where we discussed Image Optimisation, Client Dependency Framework, Mini-Profiler and implementing caching.  In this article we’ll look at the relative performance of @Html.RenderTemplate and @Html.Partial, and also look at database profiling and tuning. Consider using @Html.Partial() rather than @Html.RenderTemplate In a previous Umbraco project we had a scenario where we had a shop page and needed to iterate over a collection of products, data of which were…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Site performance is always a critical factor when building a new web project. Site speed has, for a long time, been a critical ranking factor for Google. So how do you go about tuning performance of an Umbraco site? In this series of blog posts we look at different ways of optimising Umbraco site performance. Image optimisation Many sites fail to effectively use images.  Fat bloaty images that are resized on the fly by the browser or which haven’t been…