As the official release of Firefox 3 is getting closer, with Release Candidate 1 being available since May 17th, I decided to boldly go where codinghorror has gone before and do a quick-and-dirty Javascript-performance comparison of the different browsers I’ve got installed on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop, using Webkit’s Sunspider benchmark. Let’s start with … Read more
Being the web performance zealot I am, I strive to having as little JavaScript on my sites as possible. JavaScript after all has to be downloaded and has to be executed, so extra JS will always have a performance impact even when in the best of circumstances it exceptionally does not impact Core Web Vitals … Read more
So regarding that new EU social network (which is said to be decentralized but unclear if that implies ActivityPub which would make it more relevant in my book); entering a string in the “invitation code” and clicking “continue” does not result in an XHR request to the server and there’s a lot of JS on … Read more
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 … Read more
Autoptimize Pro has “Boosters” to delay JavaScript (esp. interesting for external resources), CSS and HTML (which can be very impactful for long and/ or complex pages). Up until today’s release the delay was either until user interaction OR a set timeout of 5 seconds, but now you can choose the delay time yourself, setting it … Read more
Autoptimize can help improve your site’s performance, but in some cases after installing and activating you might encounter issues with your site. Although frustrating and maybe even scary, these problems can generally be easily resolved by re-configuring Autoptimize and I’ll be happy to share how you can do that. First off: if the problem is … Read more
A regularly reported issue for Autoptimize + Elementor users is that JavaScript optimization breaks the “Edit with Elementor” button in the front-end admin bar. The easiest workaround is to disable the “also optimize for logged in administrators/ editors” option, but below code snippet is more surgical as it will only disable JS optimization, leaving e.g. … Read more
Autoptimize 2.9 was released earlier today. It features: New: per page/ post Autoptimize settings so one can disable specific optimizations (needs to be enabled on the main settings page under “Misc Options”). New: “defer inline JS” as sub-option of “do not aggregate but defer” allowing to defer (almost) all JS Improvement: Image optimization now automatically … Read more
JavaScript often has to be excluded from being aggregated due to inline JS depending on it. That’s why Autoptimize 2.9 will also have to option to defer inline JS, allowing all JS to be deferred, even that pesky jQuery. As seen in below screenshot exclusions obviously will be honored for both inline and linked JS … Read more
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: Gravity Forms: premium-only, visual form builder, … Read more