There’s a first for everything and so last week I did a presentation at a WordPress Meetup in Antwerp titled “Autoptimize: 5 secrets and an intermezzo” which at least I had fun with.
You can find a PDF export of the presentation here.
Questions go below, in the comments (or in the form on the contact page).
Mastodon due to the decentralized nature can result in a significant extra load on your site if someone posts a link to it. Every Mastodon instance where the post is seen (which can be 1 but also 100 or 1000 or …) will request not only the page and sub-sequentially the oEmbed json object to be able to show a preview in Mastodon. The page requests should not an issue as you surely have page caching, but the oEmbed object lives behind /wp-json/ and as such is not cached by page caches. The solution; the WP Rest Cache plugin and one small code snippet (for now). A lot more info can be found in Donncha’s excellent post on the subject.
So Autoptimize Pro has finally been released, somewhat secretively (I like flying under the radar).
All info about features can be found on https://autoptimize.com/pro/ including a 20% early birds discount code, but if you use my internet nickname/ handle of whatever you want to call it (it’s part of the domain of this blog and has 3 t’s in it 😉) as coupon code between now and November 16th, you’ll get an even bigger discount!
Be quick, your website will be too 😉
It has been long overdue, but I’m finally almost ready to release Autoptimize Pro. The first version of AO Pro (an add-on to be installed on top off Autoptimize) will have Image optimization, CDN, fully automated critical CSS and a number of “boosters” to improve performance even more, with more features are in the backlog.
If you’re interested in beta-testing fill out the form below and based on data submitted I’ll pick 10 beta-testers. As a beta-tester you’ll be able to use AO Pro free of charge until the end of the year.
Beta-testing is being finalized, I am currently not looking for additional testers.
I just upped Autoptimize 2.9 beta to version 4, which is likely to be the last version before the official 2.9 release (eta end June/ early July).
Main new features;
You can download the beta from Github (do disable 2.8.x before activating 2.9-beta-4) and you can log any issues/ bugs over at https://github.com/futtta/autoptimize/issues
Looking forward to your feedback!
Given the major change in Contact Form 7‘s frontend JavaScript and the problems having to optimize the JS or cache the page after the update, the question I get asked frequently is what alternatives there are to CF7.
So here is a very quick rundown of 3 such alternatives:
My advice; try HTML Forms if you have rather standard contactform-like forms and you’re not looking for something fancy (which CF7 is not either), try Formidable if you need drag & drop form building or if you (will) need more flexibility/ integrations.
I’m sure you have been good this year so Santa cannot but put a nice ribbon around the next version of Autoptimize, out later this month. These are the most important changes:
In case you want to give Santa a hand with all that wrapping up, you can always download the Beta version here and take it out for a spin.
You probably have heard about AVIF already, but if not; it is a new image format which is based on the AV1 video format and generally has superior compression than the better-known WebP, JPEG, PNG and GIF formats. Avif is currently supported by Chrome & Opera and can be enabled by setting the image.avif.enabled flag in Firefox.
So now you know what it is you may want to use it on your WordPress site? In that case -and the title kind of gives it away- the freshly released Autoptimize 2.7.8 now has support for AVIF if you have image optimization active. Just as for WebP Autoptimize hooks into the lazyload JavaScript to detect if your visitor’s browser supports AVIF and will switch the requests to the ShortPixel CDN to that format if so. If AVIF is not support but WebP is, the requests will be for WebP images and if those are not supported old-fashioned JPEG’s will be loaded.
So there you have it, AVIF is now available in WordPress!
So AVIF is a new(ish) image format that promises even better optimization then WebP and is supported in desktop Chrome & behind a preference in Firefox; go to about:config and set image.avif.enabled to true.
If you are using Autoptimize to optimize your images and you want to test AVIF images, you can use below code snippet to do so;
add_filter('autoptimize_filter_imgopt_webp_js', function(){return '<script data-noptimize="1">function c_img(a,b){src="avif"==b?"data:image/avif;base64,AAAAIGZ0eXBhdmlmAAAAAGF2aWZtaWYxbWlhZk1BMUIAAADybWV0YQAAAAAAAAAoaGRscgAAAAAAAAAAcGljdAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGxpYmF2aWYAAAAADnBpdG0AAAAAAAEAAAAeaWxvYwAAAABEAAABAAEAAAABAAABGgAAABoAAAAoaWluZgAAAAAAAQAAABppbmZlAgAAAAABAABhdjAxQ29sb3IAAAAAamlwcnAAAABLaXBjbwAAABRpc3BlAAAAAAAAAAEAAAABAAAAEHBpeGkAAAAAAwgICAAAAAxhdjFDgQ0MAAAAABNjb2xybmNseAACAAIAAYAAAAAXaXBtYQAAAAAAAAABAAEEAQKDBAAAACJtZGF0EgAKCBgADsgQEAwgMgwf8AAAWAAAAACvJ+o=":"data:image/webp;base64,UklGRhoAAABXRUJQVlA4TA0AAAAvAAAAEAcQERGIiP4HAA==";var c=new Image;c.onload=function(){var d=0<c.width&&0<c.height;a(d,b)},c.onerror=function(){a(!1,b)},c.src=src}function s_img(a,b){w=window,"avif"==b?!1==a?c_img(s_img,"webp"):w.ngImg="avif":!1==a?w.ngImg=!1:w.ngImg="webp"}c_img(s_img,"avif");document.addEventListener("lazybeforeunveil",function({target:a}){window.ngImg&&["data-src","data-srcset"].forEach(function(b){attr=a.getAttribute(b),null!==attr&&-1==attr.indexOf("/client/to_")&&a.setAttribute(b,attr.replace(/\/client\//,"/client/to_"+window.ngImg+","))})});</script>';});
Use the the code snippets plugin to add this (easy and safe) or if you’re adventurous add it to your theme’s functions.php.
If you tested your blog’s performance on Google PageSpeed Insights yesterday and do so again today, you might be in for a surprise with a lower score even if not one byte (letter) got changed on your site. The reason: Google updated PageSpeed Insights to Lighthouse 6, which changes the KPI’s (the lab data metrics) that are reported, adds new opportunities and recommendations and changes the way the total score is calculated.
So all starts with the changed KPI’s in the lab metrics really; whereas up until yesterday First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Time to Interactive, First Meaningful Paint, First CPU Idle and First input delay were measured, the last 3 ones are now not shown any more, having been replaced by:
The total score is calculated based on all 6 metrics, but the weight of the 3 “old” ones (FCP, SI, TTI) is significantly lowered (from 80 to 45%) and the new LCP & TBT account for a whopping 50% of your score (CLS is only 5%).
Lastly some one very interesting opportunity and two recommendations I noticed;
Summary: Google Pagespeed Insights changed a lot and it forces performance-aware users to stay on their toes. Especially sites with lots of (3rd party) JavaScript might want to reconsider some of the tools used.