I recently decided I need to start writing daily to build a habit and improve my communication skills. Truth be told, I effortlessly find excuses to keep from writing. You’re a developer, a designer, at best a passable copy editor. Just because all this is true shouldn’t prevent me from expending a little effort.
I won’t be posting daily, much of this challenge is intended to break my decades old habit of creating excuses not to write. I’ll likely spend much of it in a pocket notebook with pen in hand. At the end of this month I’ll recap the experience, particularly what methods I found to be the least restrictive.
I will try following
Posting to my website using the WordPress app, dashboard and WP-CLI
NPR’s Morning Edition had a short segment on the health risks of sitting at home for more than two hours at a time.
Interestingly, I have been using a Fitbit the last few years to alert me if I don’t take at least 250 steps per hour. Now that I’m good about moving at work it looks like I should add a few hours to that reminder while I’m at home too.
Last week I delve into web sustainability which led to running several tests using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. As I knocked out one suggestion then the next I was surprised how simple delivery enhancements can speed up even the leanest website.
PageSpeed Insights
Websites are heavy, even a simple blog post can easily pass 2 megabites just displaying text. As I drilled down the path to a score of 100 the suggested fixes turned into a game. By removing Open Sans as a web font I saved 300ms. It’s a secondary font on this theme and I didn’t even perceive the swap for my browsers default of DejaVu Sans. Here are some of my favorite enhancements.
Setting font-display to swap can save a few seconds. Fonts can be render blocking until the whole page has downloaded. Yikes.
Fewer calls to third party servers really do make a noticeable difference. Even Jetpack which leverages caching and a content delivery network adds unnecessary weight to a page.
After purging every unnecessary bit from this theme some of the pages load in less than a second.
Caching is easy
A few years ago I shrugged off caching, I always tried to keep my projects lean so adding a plugin to scrape off 500 milliseconds didn’t seem important. However, when you add up those extra kilobytes and half seconds over the total viewership of a website the improvements can be easily perceived.
JavaScript is a beast, less so when cached
CSS and HTML can be cached allowing for the DOM to fly by
I also gained a new respect for lazy loading images
Enough ranting, here’s some screenshots.
PageSpeed Insights Report for this website on the Desktop view.PageSpeed Insights score this website for the Mobile view.
