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!
A couple of days ago while racing my bicycle and not really thinking much, the next idea for Autoptimize just came to move; add a field to the metabox to allow an image to be specified as “to be preloaded” to help with Largest Contentful Paint.
Well, this has now been committed to the beta-version in 3 guises; when image optimization or image lazyload is active, AO will look for the full <img tag and use that to create a responsive preload tag. If the preload does not match an <img tag or if those 2 optimizations are not active, AO will add a non-responsive preload.
But enough writing, why don’t you go off to download the Beta now and play with it yourself already? All feedback is welcome!
