Tag
Making WordPress sites load faster.
WordPress Tutorials
WP-Cron is not a scheduler. It is a queue checked when somebody visits your site, which explains every scheduled post that never published and every backup that silently stopped running.
WordPress Tutorials
AMP was a bargain: accept a restricted subset of the web and get a speed guarantee plus preferential placement. The placement went away, the restrictions did not, and that changes the answer.
WordPress Tutorials
Four pieces sit under every WordPress site, and most hosting problems are really a question about which one is responsible. Knowing the division makes support tickets shorter and diagnoses correct.
Plugins
The newer builders were designed by people who had watched the older ones age badly. They output cleaner markup and demand more of you — and they make exactly the same bargain about who owns your pages.
Themes
Neve is one of the genuinely light multipurpose themes, and its free tier is unusually complete. The catch is that the starter sites arrive as builder content, and that is what you end up maintaining.
WordPress Tutorials
A map is the heaviest thing most contact pages load, and on many sites it is also an untracked third-party connection. Both are fixable, and the cheapest fix is often not to embed a live map at all.
WordPress Tutorials
Core search matches words in post titles and content, in date order, with no ranking worth the name. On a small blog that is fine. On anything larger it quietly sends people away.
Plugins
WP Rocket is a caching plugin whose real product is defaults that work. There is no free version, the licence renews annually, and on good hosting some of what it does is already done.
Plugins
wpDataTables handles the tables a simple table plugin cannot — thousands of rows, live SQL sources, filtering and charts. That capability is why it is heavy, and why most sites do not need it.
Plugins
Site Kit connects Search Console, Analytics, AdSense and PageSpeed to your admin and shows you the numbers there. It is the least risky way to add tracking, and the dashboard is the least useful part of it.
Plugins
FacetWP builds the filter sidebar that shops, directories and archives keep asking for. It is very good at it, and it is a subscription your templates end up depending on.
Plugins
Social Warfare is a share button plugin with an emphasis on speed and control. The harder question it raises is whether share buttons still earn the space and the requests they cost.