Performance optimization Practical
Measuring how speed reaches revenue on your own site
"One second costs you X percent" is someone else's number. Your drop-off points are yours to measure — and measuring them is not hard.
Technote
Performance optimization
Caching, Redis, Core Web Vitals, image optimisation and query tuning — everything that makes WordPress fast, grounded in measurements rather than folklore.
44 articles· Performance optimization
Performance optimization Practical
Feeling slow is not the signal to upgrade
Problems that a bigger plan fixes and problems it never touches are separate from the start. Upgrade without telling them apart and you have spent money and kept…
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.
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…
Performance optimization Practical
Thirty seconds before you upload a photo
What a camera or phone produces is far larger than a screen ever needs. Three quick adjustments before uploading make a visible difference to the first screen.
Performance optimization Intro
Check your own visitors, not the industry average
"Most traffic is mobile these days" is not an answer about your site. Your answer is already in your own analytics, ten minutes away.
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.
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…
Performance optimization Intro
What happens in the seconds before your page appears
Visitors do not remember load time in seconds; they remember an impression. What shapes it is not the wait but what they see during it.
Performance optimization Practical
What happens as your database quietly grows
A database grows far faster than your content does — and most of what accumulates is by-product, not the writing you actually did.
Performance optimization Practical
What you miss by only checking on a desktop
You build on a large screen; your visitors arrive on small ones. The problems that gap creates are quiet ones — they cost you visitors without ever looking…
Performance optimization Practical
How to stop sending desktop images to phones
srcset gives the browser candidates; sizes tells it which one to pick. Get one right and the other still ruins the outcome.