WordPress is a pretty reliable CMS for the most part. After all, it’s been tested and retested on millions of sites all over the world, and most the kinks have been worked out. Despite all that, it sometimes behaves unexpectedly – like when you suddenly see a 404 “Not Found” error where you shouldn’t. Maybe […]
5 Tips To Get Started With WordPress Gutenberg
In the past, I’ve written about my issues with the WordPress Gutenberg editor , and with its focus on “blocks” for everything. However, now that it’s here and part of WordPress for good, let’s take a look at a few tips to make it more manageable. The core theme of Gutenberg will always remain the […]
How To Create A Review Schema In WordPress
Google already does a pretty good job of understanding the content of our site. Even if you don’t do take any special steps, it will figure out that this might be a review site, or an affiliate site, or whatever. However, you can always help it along by specifying exactly what’s on your page, and […]
How To Defer Javascript Properly In WordPress
In an earlier article, I’d shown you how to defer Javascript properly so that it does two things: Doesn’t interfere with page rendering Doesn’t break stuff However, that particular configuration doesn’t work for everyone. Despite taking precautions, there are some plugins and themes that won’t work even when the scripts are “deferred” with jQuery excluded. […]
How To Make Fonts Non-Render Blocking
A short while ago, I’d written about how to load Google fonts locally in order to speed up your site. While we’re on the matter of fonts, we should also consider what happens to text while the fonts haven’t been downloaded yet. One of the key principles of page speed optimization is that the page […]
Why Cloudflare “Cache Everything” Isn’t A Good Idea
Cloudflare is a pretty amazing service, and probably the only on that I know of with a free reverse proxy setup. For most website owners, its value comes from the caching service for static assets by default. I personally also use its DNS servers since I find their response times far faster than those used […]
How To Change The Layout For Specific Pages On WordPress
A WordPress blog can consist of a large variety of topics. Some pages are “information only”, yet others play a key role in the decision process. Not all page layouts are appropriate for all situations. For example, you might want to experiment with a new sidebar for certain pages only. In this tutorial, I’m going […]
How To Load Google Fonts Locally To Speed Up Your Site
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 […]