WordPress

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 […]

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I wait for around 4 days before I update plugins on my site. The reason is simple – I want to avoid any bugs that come with new updates. So for me, 4 days is the minimum time I wait since the last change. You won’t believe […]

With Google’s Core Web Vitals’ deadline in May drawing every closer, website owners are becoming more and more desperate to get the “green” lines in their search consoles like this: Unfortunately, they’re finding that getting a good score on all these following metrics is really hard! Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) First […]

I perform a regular audit of the traffic hitting the origin server on my site WP-Tweaks, to see which requests are using the most resources. For a while now, I’ve noticed that feeds were the cause of a large number of requests. So if your website is: example.com/ Then your feed URL is likely: example.com/feed/ […]

Yesterday when I was checking up on the Cloudflare cache performance for my site WP-Tweaks.com, I saw this: After filtering traffic that made it past my cache to hit the origin server directly, I saw a huge spike of requests in an incredibly short time. What’s more, they were either redirected or gave a 404. […]

I continue to grapple with the consequences of uninstalling Jetpack on my WordPress website. Earlier, I’d written about how I needed to find an alternative contact form solution to replace the one that Jetpack provided. Now, there’s one more piece of functionality that I’m sure many people use, and which Jetpack provides for free – […]

Last week, I wrote about how I finally uninstalled Jetpack from WordPress. The plugin was too large, had constant updates, utilized external services, and was generally getting too unwieldy. I made the case that it was better to have smaller, specialized plugins instead of a single large one. It helps with site stability by removing […]

In version 5.5, WordPress finally announced that it would automatically generate XML sitemaps for the website. Sitemaps have been used for years to inform search engines about pages on your site. Without that, there would be no way for a crawler to discover all the pages unless they were linked to by others. And if […]

I’ve been a faithful Jetpack user for years. I’ve watched as Automatic constantly brought in new features and functionalities, making it ever larger. I’ve had my share of problems with deactivating the REST API and the XMLRPC functionality, while trying to keep Jetpack working. Yesterday however, I took the plunge and uninstalled Jetpack from my […]