One of the most basic principles of site speed is to reduce the number of domains that your page requests on each load. To this end, I’ve come to the opinion that a CDN like CloudFlare’s reverse proxy is much more efficient than traditional CDN networks since it doesn’t need to resolve an additional domain. […]
How To Track Page Speed Accurately In Google Analytics
After all your page speed optimizations are done, how do you know if they’re having an actual impact on the loading speed? No matter how many speed tests you conduct with the pagespeed tool by Google or on webpagetest.org, there’s no substitute for real-world monitoring. With testing tools, you at best get a simulacrum of […]
How To Disable DoubleClick In Google Analytics
In our series of articles on how to improve page speed, a constant theme is culling as many external resources as possible. Google fonts, CSS and Javascript. Every additional script or CSS file that loads slows things down. Yes, we can defer the loading, and make sure that the viewer can start interacting with the […]
How To Inline And Defer CSS On WordPress Without Plugins
Knowing how to inline and defer CSS on your WordPress site is a vital part of improving the viewer experience. While it doesn’t improve your page load time, it makes a huge difference to how the user perceives the page to load. Normally, all externally linked CSS stylesheets are render-blocking. Which means that the browser […]
The RIGHT Way To Load Javascript In WordPress (Without A Plugin)
Continuing on with our series on how to make your site faster, this article will show you how to load all Javascript in WordPress until after the page has finished parsing. In an earlier tutorial, I’d shown you how to correctly load jQuery from a CDN – usually Google. If you’ve read that, then you […]
Why You Should Avoid Adding CSS In The Theme Customizer In WordPress
In October 2016, the guys working at WordPress decided to include a CSS customer in the theme customization options. Previously this functionality was available only to Jetpack users, and it was one of the reasons why I used to recommend Jetpack to everyone. Before this, users needed to find a 3rd party plugin for their […]
Benefits Of The Jetpack Site Accelerator In WordPress
On the 6th of November, Automattic released a new version of Jetpack with an exciting new feature – “Site Acceleration”. I generally hold off for a week or so before installing a new plugin update, just to wait for any potential bugs to be worked out. But once I had it installed, I got a […]
The RIGHT Way To Load jQuery From A CDN In WordPress
jQuery is a staple feature of almost all websites on the web. If a site has Javascript, it probably has jQuery. Unfortunately, this success has brought some problems with it, as explained below. While there’s no easy solution, one step towards mitigating it is to load jQuery from a CDN. There are lots of tutorials […]
How To Force Cloudflare To Cache Resources
I’ve spent the weekend speeding up my site with Cloudflare. At the end of the day, here are my pagespeed results from Google’s Lighthouse tool: As you can see, I’ve scored in the green for everything, and I already know what I have to do to reach 100%. And all of this was due to […]
Comply With WCAG Contrast Accessibility Standards
Google recently deployed their new “Lighthouse” tool to the general public. It’s a project that analyzes a web page and provides detailed recommendations on a variety of issues like performance, SEO, and accessibility. It gives a score for each of these categories and allows you to tweak your page accordingly. Given that some recent comparisons […]