I have started hosting more and more of the assets for sites, like web-fonts and JavaScripts libraries, stats, with the sites themselves instead of using a CDN / third-party service, largely because I was starting to feel squeamish about my role in helping tech giants follow you across the internet.
website speed
Writing less.
A nice old (2016) video of a talk by Heydon Pickering about writing less code. It’s smart, funny, and I agree.
Tweaked my expires headers
I’m adding this to my .htaccess file at the moment:
# Enable expirations
ExpiresActive On
# Default directive
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
# Favicon
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
# Images
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
# PDF
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 year"
# CSS
# ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
# Javascript
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
Speeding up local install of WordPress in XAMPP
My local installs of WordPress in XAMPP where excruciatingly slow, easily 5 seconds for each page load even with a clean install of WordPress. Local installs are supposed to make development in WordPress easier but 5 second page loads make it harder. I found solutions for this in several places and I’m linking one that has several of them in one answer on Stack Overflow.
Load CSS asynchronously
Came across a short and clear article about loading CSS asynchronously to speed up page rendering.