Dynamic website caching is one of the bedrocks of any modern website. Even if you have low traffic, caching can help you deliver your content faster to users, reducing the bounce rate, increasing your conversions, and even score points with search engines. With Google’s Lighthouse initiative, it now collects data on average load speeds of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Should You Enable Comments On Your Website?
The past few years have seen a dramatic change in the way conversations evolve around web articles. At first, before social media, the only avenue was the comments section underneath the article. Then much of the conversation began to revolve around the distribution channels – like Facebook comments. If you want to disable or enable […]
How To Rewrite Your WordPress URLs To Point To A CDN
Subscribing to a CDN is just half the battle. The next challenge is finding a way to rewrite the URLs of all your static assets to the new CDN URL. In this article, I’ll share the best plugin I’ve found for the job, and why other solutions don’t work. Note that you don’t need to […]