Blog
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WordPress Page Builders and Performance (The Brutal Truth)
Page builders promise speed, but usually not the kind that matters most. They promise faster development, faster editing, and faster iteration. They make it easier to launch pages without waiting on a developer. They give marketers, designers, and site owners more control over layout and presentation. That convenience is real, and pretending otherwise would be…
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How to Control Third-Party Scripts Without Breaking Marketing and Analytics
Third-party scripts are everywhere. Any decent site out there has some version of analytics. But there are also marketing pixels, A/B testing tools, personalization engines, chat widgets, heatmaps, advertising trackers, and consent platforms that all want to run on your site. Each one promises valuable insight or functionality for the business. I get it. And…
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Response Headers and Everything You Should Know About Them
Most WordPress performance advice focuses on assets. Compress images, minify CSS, defer JavaScript, etc. You’ve seen them. And, those things matter, but they’re not the layer that ultimately decides whether your site scales. Headers do. Response headers are the instructions that tell browsers, CDNs, and proxies how they’re allowed to treat your content. They determine…
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Optimizing the WordPress REST API for Performance and Scalability
The WordPress REST API is a powerful tool for building custom WordPress-powered applications. It enables headless setups, mobile apps, third-party integrations, and increasingly, large parts of WordPress core itself. But it can also become a performance bottleneck if you treat it like a simple data pipe. In this article, we’ll go beyond surface-level advice and…
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Are you paying attention?
Every so often we see these clickbaity hot takes claiming WordPress is dead, done, and over. No future. Nothing left. First, as a community, we engage far too much with these posts and feed the algorithms more than we should. We really need to stop doing that. Second, it could not be further from the…
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A New Direction for My Agency: Northbound
This year marks twenty years since I started running a WordPress agency. What began as building WordPress websites gradually evolved into something much broader. Over two decades, Truer than North has handled high-performance builds, complex WooCommerce implementations, infrastructure decisions, performance optimization, scaling challenges, and long-term client partnerships. The work has always been technical at its…
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Not From Holland
I work internationally. That means I introduce myself to people from all over the world on a weekly basis. At some point in almost every conversation, someone says something like: “Oh, you’re from Holland!” And every single time, I respond: “Actually, I’m from the Netherlands. More specifically, from Fryslân.” It’s never said with irritation. It’s…
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Performance Plugins Layers Explained
I hear this a lot. Someone tells me they’re using a performance plugin, so they don’t need anything else. Caching is on, scores look decent, and the assumption is that adding more would either do nothing or make things worse. That conclusion makes sense if performance were a single switch. But it absolutely is not.…
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Why Cloudflare Free Caching Is Not the Same as APO for WordPress
There is a persistent argument that you can rely entirely on Cloudflare’s free tier caching for WordPress and ignore Cloudflare APO. On the surface, that argument sounds reasonable enough because Cloudflare’s free plan is genuinely good at what it does. But it also stops short exactly where WordPress performance problems actually begin. The difference between…