-
WordPress Page Builders and Performance (The Brutal Truth)
Written on the
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… Read More →
-
How to Control Third-Party Scripts Without Breaking Marketing and Analytics
Written on the
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… Read More →
-
Response Headers and Everything You Should Know About Them
Written on the
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… Read More →
-
Optimizing the WordPress REST API for Performance and Scalability
Written on the
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… Read More →
-
Performance Plugins Layers Explained
Written on the
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.… Read More →
-
Why Cloudflare Free Caching Is Not the Same as APO for WordPress
Written on the
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… Read More →
-
Your “Fast” Hosting Might Still Be the Problem
Written on the
Often times when I’m doing performance reviews for WordPress sites, the topic of what’s fast WordPress hosting comes up. If I then learn their hosting is limited in a great many different ways, I suggest to look at hosting alternatives. I’m then regularly told, “I’m on good hosting, so it must be something else.” I… Read More →
-
Stop Asking Which Plugins to Use
Written on the
Last week I did a live stream with Kevin Geary about how to build blazingly fast WordPress sites. Today I’m going on a live stream with Rino de Boer to talk about performance as well. And as Rino announced it on X, someone replied there and said this: “Ask him which plug-ins to use and… Read More →
-
How To Do WordPress & Security
Written on the
Security in the context of WordPress is a topic I see being misrepresented often. Misrepresented in the way that “just install our solution” is presented as the golden ticket. It’s not. Let’s get this out of the way first: installing a “WordPress security plugin” doesn’t make your site secure. Most of the WordPress solutions out… Read More →