Why attempt speed optimization of your WordPress website without plugins? A sluggish website is more than just a minor inconvenience—it’s a significant roadblock when you’re trying to build online success. In fact, according to a 2022 study by Portent, in the first five seconds of loading a page, every additional second reduces website conversion rates by an average of 4.5%. While WordPress performance plugins might seem like the go-to solution to address this problem, they’re not always your best bet. Sure, they offer quick fixes, but they can also introduce a host of additional issues, from security vulnerabilities to code bloat. […]
The WordPress Core Performance Team: What Do They Do?
The WordPress Core Performance Team is a relatively new addition to the roster of WordPress teams. Just like the Sustainability Team, it hasn’t been around for that long. Partially, that’s because performance used to be a high priority for the WordPress community to address. Performance was mostly outsourced to hosting providers and plugins. Plus, there are so many things that users can do themselves to speed up WordPress websites. However, reports started piling up that WordPress was being left in the dust by competitors. As a consequence, the community decided that it was time to make WordPress core performance a […]
WordPress Back End Slow? 15 Ways to Speed Up the Dashboard
Ever felt like you’re stuck in a time loop while waiting for your WordPress dashboard to load? If you’re dealing with a WordPress back end slow down, you’re not alone. A sluggish admin panel isn’t just a minor inconvenience — it’s a significant roadblock to effective website management. But here’s the good news: a laggy dashboard isn’t a life sentence. This article will guide you through a comprehensive set of strategies to optimize your WordPress dashboard’s performance. Say goodbye to slow load times and hello to a more efficient WordPress experience. 1. Check Your Connections Your Internet connection can be a […]
7 Must-Have Pages Every Website Needs (+ 11 Optional Ones)
What are must-have, essential pages for every website? Every website consists of different web pages (or at least one, the homepage). However, they are not always the same for every type of site. For example, a website without eCommerce capabilities does not need a shop page. Having one would only confuse and frustrate your audience. At the same time, there are a number of pages that almost every kind of website needs to function properly, fulfill visitor expectations, or even legal reasons. And in this post, we will go over them, define why each page matters, what to put on […]
Mastodon and WordPress: 8 Ways to Make Them Work Together
Mastodon and WordPress seem like a pretty good match for each other. Both are open source platforms based on similar philosophies: To give users a way to build their own piece of online real estate and help democratizing publishing. Considering their commonalities, wouldn’t it make sense to find ways for the two platforms to work more closely together and integrate with each other? That’s exactly what we want to explore in this post. The following article talks about how you can use your WordPress site to verify your account on Mastodon, how to display Mastodon content in WordPress, automatically post […]
Google Link Best Practices Guide: What It Means for Your SEO
If you want to rank well in search engines, links, specifically backlinks, are essential. They signal to Google and other search engines that others like your content and endorse it. Besides content, they are the most important ranking factor that Google considers. The search engine uses links to gauge the relevancy of you pages for different topics and also to discover new pages to index. Usually, Google is not super forthcoming about their algorithm and how exactly they judge websites, however, they recently published a guide for link building best practices. The earlier version only contained information about how to […]
8 Ways Generative AI Will Have an Impact on Search and SEO
AI continues to dominate the headlines. Everyone is wondering how it will change the way we live and do things, including if it will replace us all. One area where it is relevant especially for website owners and online marketers to examine the impact that generative AI will have is search and SEO. Since search engines and websites are both in the business of answering users’ search for information, it makes sense to ask if artificial intelligence will take over their job as well. In the future, if someone wants to know the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci or how […]
WordPress Sustainability Team: Here’s What It’s All About
If you are familiar with WordPress as a project, you probably know that it is divided into teams for different areas. There is the Core team, the Design team, and the Polyglots team, which we have talked about before. In this post, we want take a look at the newest addition to the roster: the WordPress Sustainability team. The topic of sustainability first came up during a Q&A session with Matt and Josepha at WordCamp Europe 2022. This also resulted in the establishment of a #sustainability channel in the official WordPress Slack chat to give members of the community a […]
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) in WordPress: How to Eliminate It
With this chapter on Cumulative Layout Shift, we are nearing the end of our miniseries on Core Web Vitals for WordPress users. In the earlier chapters on Largest Contentful Paint and First Input Delay, we already talked about what exactly those terms mean and how to optimize your website for each of them. Now, we want to do the same for CLS. In the following, we cover what exactly Cumulative Layout Shift is, how it’s calculated, how to test your website for its performance in this area, and what’s a good value to aim for. After that, we give you […]
How to Improve First Input Delay (FID) on Your WordPress Site
We recently started off a new series on Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics with a post on Largest Contentful Paint. Here, we want to continue with the next candidate in line: First Input Delay or FID for short and how to improve it in WordPress. In the following, we will take a deep dive into what FID is and how to optimize your WordPress website for it. You’ll learn to understand and measure First Input Delay, what value you should aim for, and how to improve it if necessary. Note that this post assumes that you are already familiar with […]
No Comments