So I like and use Spectra (aka “ultimate addons for gutenberg”) on some of my WordPress sites. If you use Spectra as well, you might want to be know that Spectra 2.12 has a significant performance regression, sucking in almost all of wp-includes/js/dist. Here’s hoping this was not intentional and that it’ll get fixed soon … Read more
As I wrote earlier an Autoptimize user proposed to switch from regular expression based script & style extraction to using native PHP DOM functions (optionally with xpath). I created a small test-script to compare performance and the DOM methods are on average 500% slower than the preg_match based solution. Here are some details; There are … Read more
Although it is easy to download and install free or “premium” themes, WordPress does come with a default theme that is updated yearly. Last year I did performance tests of Twenty Twelve and there were some performance-issues, which led me to create a cleary faster child theme (2012.FFWD). But how does Twenty Thirteen fare, you … Read more
Twenty Twelve is beautiful but slow, so I created 2012.FFWD. This Twenty Twelve child theme looks pretty much the same as the original, but comes with the following performance-boosting changes under the hood: no webfont downloaded: loading fonts slow sites down, always. Fallback-fonts as defined in Twenty Twelve (Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif) are used instead. minimized … Read more
Based on last week’s performance analysis of popular sharing-services (AddThis, ShareThis and Lockerz/AddToAny) I decided to continue working on my high-performance & privacy-respecting but rather ad-hoc lyteShare alternative. The result is a 1.6Kb JavaScript file (or the non-minimized version here) that, upon being included in a HTML-file, looks for a div like this one: <div … Read more
[UPDATE: I reworked lyteShare into a standalone javascript-thingie] Doing Web Performance can be so easy, really! I was asked to do a performance analysis of a new website and one of the things I didn’t like was the fact that the footer contained social media sharing buttons using the ShareThis widget. I’m not a fan … Read more
So stupid me made a (smallish) mistake when working on 1.1.0, which caused WP YouTube Lyte (rapidly approaching 80.000 downloads, thanks guys & girls) to load immediately instead of waiting for the “document loaded” event (lazy loading). That got fixed in 1.1.2 (which also loads the CSS differently, resulting in 1 file less to request), … Read more
Although it was possible to embed fonts in web pages even during the dark ages of the internet, 2010 was the year when the pieces of the web typography puzzle really fell into place, Designers, Marketeers and especially “brand identity guards” are ecstatic about this evolution. But there’s little to be found on the performance … Read more
It’s all about speed! I mean, you want your visitors to stick around, enjoying your content instead of waiting for stuff to download, no? And I bet you would love Google to consider your site quick, now that speed has been confirmed to have an impact on search ranking? “High Performance web sites”-guru Steve Souders … Read more
I just reviewed the performance of a customer’s WordPress site. Things got a lot worse he wrote and he assumed Autoptimize (he was a AOPro user) wasn’t working any more and asked me to guide him to fix the issue. Instead it turns out he installed CookieYes, which adds tons of JS (part of which … Read more