The tech and browser world has been abuzz with Google’s “FLOC” technology that promises to do away with cookies entirely in favor of federated learning. But will any of this have an impact on website owners? And is it a good thing for us? What is FLOC? Simply put, FLOC means that Google will show […]
Good Riddance To Contact Forms – Hello Google Forms!
I’ve had it with plugin-based contact forms! I’ve shifted to Google Forms, and so far, it’s going great. No plugins! A while back, I began my journey to decouple my website from Jetpack. By far the most difficult part of the transition, was finding a replacement for the contact form. I want nothing fancy. Just […]
How To Identify CLS Issues Using Google Chrome
I still get a lot of requests from my previous post on the NameHero blog on how I dropped my CLS to zero. But since that time, Google’s Chrome has come out with new debugging tools that allow you to more accurately pinpoint exactly which elements are causing layout shifts. Here’s how to use it. […]
How To Achieve ~90% Cache Hit Ratio On Cloudflare
Let me start this with a screenshot of my Cloudflare dashboard showing the cache hit ratio: I’m caching 85% of all the requests to my site WP-Tweaks. Keep in mind this includes not just legitimate traffic, but also bot traffic, spam, and even hacking attempts. The good news is that you can achieve this too. […]
How Does Google Judge EAT? Probably Links!
Google loves to de-emphasize links. A quick rundown of John Mueller’s Twitter feed routinely reveals “advice” like this: Google doesn’t care about links Don’t try and create links Link building is a waste of time Content is the only thing that matters etc… Methinks Google doth protest too much. On the one hand, if Google […]
Inlined CSS – When To Use vs Stylesheets
With WordPress taking the high road and deciding to favor inlined CSS vs large stylesheets to only load CSS that’s on the page, I feel it’s time to examine our own bloated stylesheets and do what we can to reduce the number of unused CSS rules on our page. While WordPress’s latest changes will take […]
WordPress New Update Makes It Faster!
Just last month I was complaining about how WordPress needs to do more on Core Web Vitals. While the Automattic team has included several changes to speed up WordPress over the years, it’s obvious that it was never an overriding concern. Otherwise, they would never have decided to include a huge CSS styles file for […]
JSON Structured Data Template for Reviews
Google keeps changing its recommendations for the right way to incorporate product reviews in your structured data. For example a couple of years back, I’d written about some changes in Google’s specifications and how to deal with them. But since then, standards have changed again, and it’s time to provide a new JSON template for […]
QUIC.cloud With NameHero: 500% TTFB Reduction!
With Google’s major Core Web Vitals ranking update almost upon us, it’s time to reflect on whatever we can do to improve our page’s performance. I’ve written extensively about the importance of the Time to First Byte (TTFB), and its role in reducing the related metric of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). For example, getting your […]
Accurately Measure Your Website Performance
A few weeks back, I was using web.dev to test the performance of some of the pages on my site. To my surprise, I got extremely negative results – it appears that some script was taking too long to complete. On further investigation, I found that it was because of Cloudflare’s “Bot Fight” mode that […]