Performance optimization Advanced
A front-end budget you can actually hold
Pages do not get heavy in one go. They get heavy through small, individually reasonable additions. A ceiling you actually check is what stops the accumulation.
Technote
WordPress know-how, from real work Technotes worth picking
9 articles· Performance optimization · Developers
Performance optimization Advanced
Caching API responses: which layer, and how to invalidate
Adding a cache is easy. Knowing when to discard it is the work — and getting that wrong can end with payment state that never updates.
Performance optimization Advanced
Autoloaded options: finding what rides on every request
Options marked autoload are read and unserialised on every request. One large blob quietly taxes the entire site, and nothing on screen says so.
Performance optimization Advanced
Removing parent theme assets, and the responsibility you inherit
Dropping unused scripts is possible. But you inherit responsibility for whatever depended on them, so you need a procedure for finding out what actually breaks.
Performance optimization Practical
Transients: caching hands you an invalidation problem
Storing takes three lines. Deciding when to delete is the hard part, and there are at least two events. Miss either one and the symptoms differ sharply.
Performance optimization Practical
The object cache: what Redis actually removes
Repeated identical lookups disappear. One slow query does not. Miss that distinction and you will wire up Redis and then ask why nothing got faster.
Performance optimization Practical
The N+1 problem: get_post_meta in a loop, and priming
WP_Query primes caches for its own results only. A hand-built list of IDs gets none of that for free — and that difference decides your query count.
Performance optimization Intro
Reading a query profile: slow versus duplicated
They sit side by side in the same panel but they are not the same problem. One needs the query rewritten; the other disappears with a cache. Telling…
Performance optimization Intro
Measure before you fix: the first thirty minutes
Optimising by intuition usually improves something. The trouble is that it was rarely the bottleneck. Start by splitting the request into segments and getting numbers.
Cited
Technotes worth reading next
Topics outside WordPress are collected on Dongji Communication Tech Insights, run by the same team. The summaries below are quoted from the originals; the titles link to them.
-
Working with AI
Writing a CLAUDE.md — teaching an AI coding assistant your project
AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot do better work the more precisely they know your project. Here is a structure and a set of principles that hold up.
-
Working with AI
Prompting an AI for UI design — drafting with Claude and GPT
Asking an AI to "make a nice button" gets you a disappointing button. Structured prompts that carry constraints, references and a defined role get you the design you meant.
-
Themes & plugins
SCSS from the ground up — variables through module structure
The core syntax of SCSS (Sass) and what it solves that plain CSS cannot: variables, nesting, mixins, @use and module structure — organised around patterns you can use immediately.
-
Themes & plugins
Design tokens and theme colour systems — brand identity in SCSS variables
How to turn a colour palette from a pile of hex codes into a system that means something — semantic token structure and SCSS variable patterns, from a real project.
-
Performance optimization
Designing a responsive typography system — the science of readability
Hard-coded pixel font sizes are over. Type scales, fluid sizing with clamp(), Korean webfont optimisation and line-height ratios — building typography that reads well on any screen.
-
Development workflow
From Figma to SCSS — a designer-developer handoff guide
Minimising what gets lost between a Figma file and the code: extracting tokens, naming components, keeping the spacing system in sync — the whole workflow, step by step.