Dealing with Elementor bloat
There is a performance cost to operating a page builder, Elementor being no exception. This effect can be mitigated by paying careful attention to the following.
Browser-safe fonts and page performance
Fonts are one of the more critical web page performance items. Some sites load unnecessary fonts, font styles, font formats, failing to set them to load in display:swap mode, or failing to declare the unicode-range to load. Any of these can deteriorate performance. Twenty fonts most devices already have There’s no need to load the […]
Hello Elementor and goodbye bloated themes
My favorite WordPress and WooCommerce theme nowadays is Hello Elementor. It’s more of a theme placeholder than a traditional theme really. Haven’t you heard? Themes are dying!
Big WooCommerce Stores
WooCommerce is known as the leading eCommerce platform for having millions of installations worldwide. It’s had a reputation for scaling challenges. Not any longer! A recent official blog post covered this topic and included examples of six larger WooCommerce stores and a link to the official showcase of sites by category. Scaling is defined there […]
How to fix time-to-first-byte (TTFB) problems
Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) is one of the most useful website performance metrics. It’s also one of the hardest to improve. Caching plugins can’t do much for it; actually they contribute to it. Caching plugins don’t fix cache warm-up, authenticated sessions, submissions / processing, and administration. To improve those you need to get TTFB in range. The recommended target is 0.5 seconds. Here’s my tips to optimize your TTFB.
WooCommerce Los Angeles Presentation: Performance Through Database Cleanup
Join WooCommerce Los Angeles Meetup back at WeWork Santa Monica Broadway on Wednesday, June 5th at 6:30pm for a demonstration session on database cleaning.
A plugin too far
How many plugins is too many for a WordPress site? Well, there’s no real answer to that question. It depends on several rather circumstantial factors…
Cleaning up your WooCommerce Database
There’s lots you can do to improve database (DB) performance, but each change comes with risks. Always thoroughly test changes in a development environment first before making permanent database changes in production. Growth in data requires a growth in hosting to handle the scale of database size and queries. There’s only so much you can […]
Load Testing WooCommerce Orders
In this video I demonstrate a basic load test of WooCommerce orders using the ReST API and artillery.io
You had me at Storefront–Benefits of using the official WooCommerce theme
Storefront* is the official open-source theme for WooCommerce powered stores. There are significant benefits to implementing the official theme and making your site’s design work with it. Storefront can improve both form and function with a little patience in working it to suit your design needs.