Die ochtend in het bos

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Deze ochtend op dagelijkse wandel in het “Mechels Bos” met onze iets grotere hond (Maya, Roemeense adoptiehond met naar we vermoeden wat collie en wat berghond genen, ze is idd groter dan Mamita onze quasi-chihuahua) hoorde ik een vreemd geluid. Luister hieronder even (geen bewegend beeld, maar foto van hier in de buurt); het beest bleef een hele tijd stil en het is niet heel luid;

Ik dacht even aan een everzwijn (die zitten hier ook) maar aangezien die niet in bomen klimmen en het geluid wel degelijk van boven in de bomen kwam heb ik het opgenomen en naar m’n vrouw gestuurd die een vogelgeluid-identificatie-app heeft draaien en het zou dus … een raaf zijn! 🙂

Improving LCP the wrong way

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Performance hack seen on a customer site; fix the bad LCP (due to an animation in revslider) by loading an inline (base64’ed) png image which according to FF is broken and later in the rendering process hiding & removing it.

Even though that image is not *really* used, tools such as Google Pagespeed Insights pick it up as the LCP image and the score is “in the green”.

Not sure this is really helping performance (spoiler: it’s not), but Pagespeed is happy and so is the customer. Crazy!

Heads-up: Autoptimize Pro price increase for 2025

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It’s been 2 years since AOPro was launched and a lot has happened in that time; bugs were squashed, improvements were made and some great features were added. Taking that into account on one hand and increasing costs from suppliers on the other: prices will see a smallish increase as from 2025 (exact amounts still to be determined)

But rest assured; if you already signed up, you will continue to pay the lower price, also when renewing. Same if you sign up before the end of the year too by the way, so if you’re considering switching on Autoptimize’s Pro features, now might be the moment! 🙂

Whatever you do, if you’re an Autoptimize users or not, if you’re an AOPro customer or not, have a great end of year! Peace and love to you and your loved ones, whomever you may be!

CookieYes? No thanks!

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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 is render-blocking), taking 3.5s of main thread work and (fasten your seat-belts) which somehow seems to increase DOM size to over 60K elements in this case.

I knew cookie consent solutions can have a performance impact, but this? Thanks but no thanks!

Spectra 2.12 performance regression (update: due to AI assistant)

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So I like and use (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 🙂

More info in https://wordpress.org/support/topic/2-12-significant-performance-regression/

Update Feb. 15th: the regression is due to the new AI features, as a workaround go to Spectra -> AI features -> Manage AI features and disable “AI Assitant” (and “AI Copilot” if you don’t need/ want that either).

AOPro 2.3: delay all JavaScript

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As of Autoptimize Pro 2.3 there is an option to delay all JavaScript. Delaying can have a bigger positive performance impact then asyncing or deferring because AOPro will only load the delayed JS after a to be defined delay or (better even) only at the moment user interaction (such as swiping/ scrolling or mouse movement) is noticed.

Obviously when delaying all JS you might want to be able to exclude and that is possible as well; you might want add data-cfasync there for example as contrary to Autoptimize’s normal behavior for deferring, delaying ignores attributes like data-cfasync, meaning that if you want to leave such JS untouched you will have to add it to the exclusion list yourself.

Lastly; if your site’s above the content depends on JavaScript to render correctly (which has serious performance impacts), delaying all JS would result in the page not rendered entirely, so test and exclude as required.

AOPro 2.2: delaying iframes (and other improvements)

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I released AOPro 2.2 today and the main new feature is the ability to delay the loading/ rendering of iFrames. Despite the fact iFrames can be lazy-loaded (using browser-native loading=lazy attribute), in reality this does not always work in WordPress, hence the new “delay iFrames” option on the Pro Boosters tab.

  • How it works: a delayed iFrame has no src but a data-src attribute. Upon user interaction (or a timeout as also specified on the Boosters settings) the src will be set. If the iFrame is a YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion video, AOPro will load the video thumbnail as a placeholder.
  • How you can activate it: by default no iframe is delayed, if you want to have e.g. YouTube video’s delayed add youtube.com to the “delay iFrames” option.
  • What’s next: this is a “minimal viable product”, but depending on user feedback I might incorporate some of WP YouTube Lyte’s functionality for video iFrames. Tell me what you think in the comments!

Apart from delaying iFrames, AOPro 2.2 also has;

  • new under the hood logic to improve the speed at which Critical CSS rules are generated and visible
  • if you are “removing CSS/ JS” then the logic change this at a per page/ post level has changed; if you want one page NOT to remove CSS/ JS, just enter none in the “Autoptimize this page” metabox. If you leave the field empty the default “removals” apply. If you put something else in there then that overrides the default removals.
  • The ShortPixel Adaptive Images JavaScript component was updated to version 1.1.