Imagine you take all the effort to optimize your site, ensure that no extra scripts are loading, and that you’ve asynchronized all everything you can. You get a nice page speed score and are happy. Then one day you check out your site speed reports in Google Analytics, and you find that your pages are […]
Why You Shouldn’t Worry Too Much About PageSpeed Score
Much of SEO is “fuzzy”. So it makes sense that we try and maximize whatever metrics we can. But metric chasing can be misleading. For example: Pageviews (without concern for targeted traffic) Rankings (without concern for audience intention) Number of backlinks (without concern for quality/relevance) All these metrics are good – when applied properly. Otherwise, […]
How To Use A Proxy In Chrome And Firefox
Often, website developers forget to test their sites in different countries. We all fall victim to the “self-sampling hypothesis”, in assuming that we ourselves are a representative sample of our visitors. Naturally, this leads to problems if you’re sitting with a high-speed, and reliable Internet connection in a server located close to your development site. […]
Affiliate Disclosures – What Do You Write On Your Blog?
With all the privacy and data kerfluffles recently, it’s critical to ensure that your affiliate website reassures customers about its authenticity. And if that wasn’t enough, you also need to keep up with the legal guidelines from the FTC. In this article, we’ll take a quick look at affiliate disclosures, how much is enough, and […]
How To Limit The Selection Of Blocks In Gutenberg
When Gutenberg came out, it brought with it, a vastly expanded selection of default content types, we call “blocks”. Previously in the TinyMCE editor, we had buttons at the top, each of which represented a different type of content – headings, lists, and those inserted by plugins. In time though, the developers felt that this […]
Why Is Your CDN Cache Hit Ratio So Low?
So you’ve just purchased a subscription to your shiny new CDN, and set it up on your site. You wait a short while and check the “hit percentage” tab on your CDN dashboard (different hosts might call it something else). And you’re disappointed to see <50% hit ratio! Many CDN providers say that they offer […]
I Don’t Immediately Update All WordPress Components. Shocked?
It seems that every day there’s a new story about someone’s site getting hacked. Typically, these stories are light on details about how exactly the site was compromised. What was the attack vector? Did it involve a rogue editor or author, or was it a brute force attack? Is there anything we as users could […]
Stop Combining CSS And JS Files – It’s Outdated!
Web technologies move at an astounding pace. But we often can’t wait for that to happen and solve our problems for us. So we develop workarounds to compensate for existing deficiencies. These workarounds are spread online and become canon. Then technology evolves, and we no longer need these workarounds. Combining your CSS and JSS files […]
How to Implement “Stale-While-Revalidate” on your Website
Lately, I’ve been much concerned with improving my cache-hit ratios on CDNs. And I recently discovered the “stale-while-revalidate” directive. While a CDN like Cloudflare is easy to set up and use, they don’t provide much in the way of statistics. Specifically, you can’t easily get cache hit ratios for static assets, because we don’t know […]
Add Code To WordPress Body Tag With Version 5.2
WordPress has a number of “hooks” that you can use to insert code into different parts of the theme. These hooks remove the need to manually modify the theme files. Using this, we can do all kinds of cool things like inserting custom content into the header, the title, and the footer. For example, I’d […]