Managing media is one of those experiences that keeps getting better out of the box in WordPress. But it is also one of the hardest parts of running any website. Images, video, and audio often account for a large majority of your page weight, and ensuring that it is optimized can go a long way towards making your site faster, cleaner and more approachable users. Fortunately, there are several plugins out there that can help you with this. Here are five. Imsanity Imsanity is a plugin with one task in mind. To limit the size of images that are uploaded […]
A Few Tips for Testing Plugins in a Live Environment
Last week, I wrote up a lengthy guide to finding the right plugin for Tidy Repo. The large majority of this has to do with testing plugins once you’ve found them, and I thought I might expand on this idea a bit. So here’s a couple of tips for anyone who feels like testing their plugins before installing it on their production site. Getting started For those looking to get a test site up quickly, there are a number of steps to take. The first is to boot up a fresh WordPress install like you would any other. The only difference […]
TechCrunch Open Sources Library for Asynchronous Tasks
TechCrunch recently underwent a pretty massive redesign, running on WordPress VIP. One of the biggest priorities for the development team was increasing performance. And not just a little, a lot. One of the tools that was integral to their giant leap in performance was the ability to run non-essential tasks to load asynchronously, meaning time consuming processes can run in the background while a page loads quickly for users. Now, the TechCrunch team has open sourced this asynchronous library so you can start using it on your own site. What’s A Non-Essential Task So what kind of things should run […]
Evaluating Plugin Weight and Performance
I was recently asked how I judge the performance and relative “weight” of plugins when I am testing them for Tidy Repo. I wish I had a one stop solution for determining this, but it’s a little more complex than that—so I thought I might detail my process here. General Testing Setup For my local dev environment I use Vagrant, and 10up’s wonderful Varying Vagrant Vagrants box. This works for most plugins, but some need to be on a live install for one reason or another, so I have a site set up on my server as well. These are […]
The WordPress Weekend Roundup
A full first week of June, can you imagine that? We’ll jump right into our weekly weekend roundup but first, make sure you check out our growing Job Board that has already gotten a lot of views and has been able to connect more than a few WordPressers with new gigs! Stoked about that as, well, that’s the point!
Common Plugin Questions: Amount, Speed, Security
I get pinged at least once a week, if not a few times during a week, about plugins – which ones they should use, download, and how many a blog or WordPress website should have. Ultimately, there isn’t any exact science to these questions but there are some general principles that seem to be agreed upon by those who work with WordPress professionally. I wanted to post simply here so as to direct people to this so they can have their questions answered succinctly, especially around performance and security. The question usually is asked like this:
Frank: Theme Tested for Performance
P.J. Onori had to expect that his free WordPress Theme on Smashing Magazine was going to force a lot of pageviews, right? Of course! SmashingMag is a huge site with tons of followers and readers and has been known to tank much smaller sites when referenced. P.J. was ready. In fact, he had created his theme called Frank specifically for speed and performance under fire and he wisely chose the “demo” site as his own personal blog as a living example of the theme. Of course, he can’t really ever change his theme now that it’s locked up as the […]
1 Comment