Improving LCP the wrong way

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!

Autoptimize: why are .php,jquery excluded from JS optimization?

If you see .php,jquery added to the JS optimization exclusion list and wonder why that is the case; these are added by WP Spamshield to ensure optimal functioning of the that plugin and when you remove them they will be re-added automatically by WP Spamshield.
I am currently exchanging information with Scott (WP Spamshield’s developer) to potentially improve this (as jquery causes all JS with jquery to be excluded from optimization) which is sub-optimal from a performance point-of-view.
If you know what you are doing (i.e. if you are willing to do the trial-and-error dance) you can trick WP Spamshield into leaving the JS optimization exclusion list as is by entering:

.php,jquery.js

which reduces the exclusion to just jquery.js (and .php, but that doesn’t really matter) which based on a (too) quick (a) test could enough for WP Spamshield to function.
.php,jquery.IknowwhatImdoing

which invalidates the exclusion of any jquery (which might work with WP Spamshield if you ‘force JS in head’).
If you do decide to trick WP Spamshield this way, this is entirely and only your responsibility and you should test this thoroughly. Don’t ask Scott (or me) for support for such ugly hacks 😉