As time goes by, I’ve come to rely more and more on Cloudflare to do the actual heavy lifting on my site. With the help of page rules, firewall configurations, and some plugins to integrate with Cloudflare caching, I’ve managed to lift most of the heavy lifting from my own site and push the workload […]
How To Get Core Web Vitals Field Data
I’ve written before about Google’s Core Web Vitals and how I dropped my CLS to zero. The problem is there’s a big difference between measuring these metrics using lab tools like Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, and actual measurements taken by users in the field. The differences can be enormous. What shows up as an […]
Tips To Securely Access Your Site from Anywhere
The number of things to think about when setting up your website is tremendous. Many of them are contingent plans that won’t bear fruit immediately but might save your hide later down the line. Backup is one such example. Others will silently protect your site in the background, and you’ll never even notice how much […]
New Widget Editor In Gutenberg 9.1
Last week, the latest version of Gutenberg was released to the public – version 9.1. It can be a bit difficult to separate the versions of Gutenberg from the one that’s bundled with WordPress itself. In fact, it’s not easy to find out exactly which version your using. But if you’d like to test out […]
How To Add HSTS To Your Website
The other day, I was passing one of my webpages through webpagetest.org, and saw that they’d added a new category to their analysis categories called “security”. And to my surprise, the webpage showed up with an “F” grade in red, like this: Naturally, I was pretty concerned at first. No one likes to think of […]
Paid SSL Is Simply Not Worth It Anymore
The developments since 2018 have dealt the death-knell for pretty much all paid SSL certificates. First the big news towards the end of 2018 that Google would be giving some (small) weightage to HTTPS websites in their search rankings. The second piece of news was from mid-2020, when Google and Apple decided to limit the […]
How Spam And Bots Can Kill Your Site
When I first started hosting on a relatively low-cost server, there came a point when my site suddenly slowed down. It became pretty bad. When I contacted my host, they suggested I upgrade to the next highest tier because I’d outgrown my existing plan. But I wasn’t yet convinced, because my traffic hadn’t suddenly increased […]
How Many Website Visitors Can Your Site Handle?
Hosting companies often segregate their plans by the recommended number of visitors that they think the package can handle. For example, here are the recommendations for NameHero’s web hosting packages (per month): Starter – 10,000 visits Plus – 25,000 visits Turbo – 50,000 visits Business – 100,000 visits Metrics like this are seriously flawed, but […]
Static WordPress – Is it Still a Good Idea?
A while ago, Google instituted its “Core Web Vitals” metrics and told us that future rankings will be (mildly) impacted by page speed. At this point, I got a little obsessed with reducing my “Time to First Byte” (TTFB) metric in order to reduce my Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time. I examined so many different […]
Disallow REST API Username Enumeration in WordPress
WordPress allows programmatic access to its metadata. This means that 3rd party software can connect to it using APIs and not directly through the web interface. It’s useful, because it allows all kinds of cool functionality. For example, Jetpack uses either XMLRPC or REST APIs to obtain all kinds of information about your installation and […]