Performance optimization Practical
Where SVG belongs, and where it does not
Icons and diagrams need not be image files. Kept as vectors they need no size variants, and their colour can be driven from CSS.
Technote
WordPress guides for Designers
For designers who own the look and the experience: how theme choice, webfonts and image handling decide whether the design survives contact with the browser.
71 articles· Designers
Themes & plugins Practical
Tap targets — minimum size and spacing for fingers
A cursor is one pixel; a fingertip is not. How to grow the hit area without growing the visuals — and why hover-only affordances simply do not exist…
Performance optimization Practical
font-display: invisible text or shifting text
This property decides what happens in the few hundred milliseconds before a webfont lands. There are five values, but the real choice is between blank text and text…
Themes & plugins Practical
Taking the colour picker away from editors
Leave the picker open and in six months the site carries colours a shade off the brand. That is not the editor's fault — the system asked.
Development workflow Practical
What to check before a theme update
Postponing an update is not a plan. Once you know what can break, updating stops being frightening and becomes a procedure with an order.
Themes & plugins Practical
Labels and errors: a placeholder is not a label
Text that vanishes the moment you type cannot be a label. Forms that hide labels and forms that signal errors with colour alone lose people in much the…
Performance optimization Practical
The one image you must never lazy-load
Lazy loading is right for nearly every image. Apply it to the large image in the first screen and you delay the very thing the metric measures.
Themes & plugins Practical
Hunting horizontal overflow — the number will not find it
scrollWidth matches the viewport and yet the screen is visibly clipped. An ancestor absorbed the overflow — so measure element rectangles instead.
Performance optimization Practical
Subsetting Korean: not downloading all 11,172 syllables
There is no mystery to why Korean fonts are heavy: modern Hangul alone has 11,172 syllable blocks. Split with unicode-range, the browser fetches only the pieces a page…
Themes & plugins Practical
What theme.json does: handing your palette to the block editor
theme.json is not a stylesheet, it is a channel. It hands your palette to the editing screen so editors choose from your system instead of a free colour…
Themes & plugins Practical
Beating theme styles without !important
You wrote the rule and nothing changed. The cause is usually order rather than specificity — and order is fixable without !important.
Themes & plugins Practical
Walking the site by keyboard: where the order breaks
Take your hand off the mouse and Tab through a page once; five minutes exposes most of it. Nearly always, the culprit is CSS having reordered the screen.