Fun fact; As per wordpress.org “popular plugins” ranking , Autoptimize is slowly but surely closing in on what used to be the go-to solution for Web Performance Optimization W3 Total Cache based on the “active installs” metric. Who would have thought? What a crazy ride …
Wolf Braun is a happy Autopitmize user and created this testimonial to tell the world just how great he thinks AO is;
Thanks Wolf, we agree! :-)
Being wary of all things tracking by Google & Facebook, both of who’s products I love but data capturing practices I hate, for the last 4 years or so I always logged in into these in “Private browsing” sessions in Firefox (because why trust the worlds biggest advertising platform with your privacy, right?)
Now I just “discovered” that the Mozilla team have rendered that somewhat clumsy procedure -which required me to log in each time I restarted my computer or browser- redundant with their “Firefox Multi-Account Containers” add-on, allowing you to contain entire sessions to one (or more) tabs;
So now I have one browser window with a couple of tabs in the Google container, one tab in a Facebook container and all others in the “default” container where Google & Facebook can’t track me (fingerprinting aside, but there’s an option for that).
I had a nice chat on The CommonSenSEO Show, if you want to hear me ramble you can do so in this video;
And if you’re into SEO, do subscribe to the channel!
Autoptimize just joined the “1+ million active installs”-club. Crazy!
I’m very happy, thanks everyone for using, thanks for the support-questions & all the great feedback therein and especially thanks to the people who actively contributed and especially-especially to Emilio López (Turl) for creating Autoptimize and handing it over to me back in 2013 and to Tomaš Trkulja who cleaned up al lot of the messy code I added to it and introducing me to PHP codesniffer & Travis CI tests.
Over the past couple of months, since the release of WordPress 5.0 which includes Gutenberg, the new JavaScript-based block editor, I have seen many sites loading a significant amount of extra JavaScript from wp-includes/js/dist on the frontend due to plugins doing it wrong.
So dear plugin-developer-friends; when adding Gutenberg blocks please differentiate between editor access and visitor access, only enqueue JS/ CSS if needed to display your blocks and when registering for front-end please please frigging please don’t declare wp-blocks, wp-element, … and all of those other editor goodies as dependencies unless your 100% sure this is needed (which will almost never be the case).
The performance optimization crowd will thank you for being considerate and -more likely- will curse you if you are not!
Concerning the very short-notice release-announcement of WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg for Dec 6th: I’m with Yoast;
He has a great “should I update”-checklist and conclusion in this blogpost;
- Is now the right time to update?
- Can your site work with Gutenberg?
- Do you need it?
So our advice boils down to: if you can wait, wait.
So if you have a busy end-of-year, if you’re not 100% sure your site will work with Gutenburg or if you don’t really need Gutenberg in the first place; wait (while WordPress 5.0 stabilizes with some minor releases).