Introduction
Youappz Sitez is a specialized platform for efficient delivery of static webpages and website assets. We take care of the configuration details for you that provide the best balance of performance and maintainability. Stop fiddling with CDNs and web server configs and focus on coding great front-end experiences.
Performance
Youappz utilizes a multi-layered global CDN so no matter where in the world your website visitors come from, the request is routed to the lowest latency servers. Website requests are initially routed to the optimal AWS CloudFront edge node (located throughout the world). Many assets such as images, JavaScripts, stylesheets, etc. are delivered directly from CloudFront. Your webpage requests are passed along to the lowest latency Youappz origin server (currently Oregon or Frankfurt, Germany with plans to expand to other regions). All resources are served with optimal caching headers by default.
Our friends at Dotcom Monitor provide a great free webpage speed test that allows you to easily measure your website perormance from 25 different physical locations around the globe. This is a great way to visualize the real-world impact of serving website assets from a nearby CDN node vs. a central origin server.
Security
All Youappz sites are served exclusively via SSL. All http:// requests are 301 redirected at the CDN edge to the https:// equivalent. Custom domains (included in Pro Plan) include a wildcard auto-renewing SSL certificate — set it once and never worry about certs again.
For additional security you can declare the http-headers plugin in your appz.yml to append OWASP recommended headers to your HTTP responses.
Custom 404 page
Custom 404 error pages are specified with the custom-errors plugin.
plugins: - name: custom-errors options: errors: 404: errors/404.html
Site scanner
The site scanner crawls and examines the content of your website after each deployment. Currently the only function of the scanner is to build the search index for the keyword-search plugin, but it has been designed to offer additional site services for catching broken links and performing SEO audits. See the site-scanner configuration for further details. Device preview
You can tack on a **preview={laptop|desktop|phone|tablet} to any Youappz website URL to load it in a special viewer that simulates how the site looks on different device types. The value of the **preview querystring parameter determines the default selected device. For example, here is the URL to preview youappz.com on a phone: https://www.youappz.com/?__preview=phone. This is a handy way to share a URL with stakeholders so they can get a sense for how the site looks on different devices without having to actually load it on a phone, a tablet, etc.