performance

Autoptimize closing in on W3 Total Cache

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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 …

We just joined the club!

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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.

Google Font display swap in Autoptimize?

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Autoptimize 2.5.1 (out earlier this week) does not have an option to enforce font-display on Google Fonts just yet, but this little code snippet does exactly that;

add_filter('autoptimize_filter_extra_gfont_fontstring','add_display');
function add_display($in) {
  return $in.'&display=swap';
}

Happy swapping (or fallback-ing or optional-ing) 🙂

Developers: don’t make Gutenberg go Badass-enberg on my frontend!

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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!

Autoptimize 2.5 almost ready, last call for testers!

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Autoptimize 2.5 is almost ready! It features a new “Images”-tab to house all Image optimization options, including support for lazy-loading images and WebP (the only next-gen image format that really matters, no?);

So download the beta and test lazy-loading and WebP (and all of the other changes) and let me know of any issue you might find!

Google PageSpeed Insights; the great Defer unused CSS mystery to be resolved?

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You know that frustrating Google PageSpeed Insights opportunity “Defer unused CSS”? Well, it’s going to be renamed soon (in Lighthouse first, so GPSI should follow) as per this Github merged pull request;

The full text will read;

Remove unused CSS
Remove dead rules from stylesheets and defer the loading of CSS not used for above-the-fold content to reduce unnecessary bytes consumed by network activity.