Best WordPress Plugin for Custom Fields & Meta Boxes
Hosting is a popular topic when it comes to WordPress sites. Many users often find it difficult to choose the right hosting solution for their website and sometimes it could become a tedious task. The reason is simple, you have a lot of options available out there and you can’t test them all.
Continue reading "The Detailed Review of Cloudways - A High Performance WordPress Hosting" →
Normally, almost all websites use the searching function supplied by WordPress. It works well with basic needs. But if you want to use advanced features to improve the user experience, the default search box is not enough.
Continue reading "Create an Advanced Search Box in WordPress" →
Website owners and developers as well usually care about improving the website’s loading speed. One of the most effective techniques to do that is removing the unused CSS and Javascript files. This execution is quite simple. We are going to show you how to find unused CSS and JS files, and then clean up CSS and JS with a dedicated plugin or a self-created plugin in WordPress.
Continue reading "How to Remove Unused CSS and JavaScript Files in WordPress" →
Azure is a top cloud vendor offering a wide range of cloud storage services, which you can use to host your WordPress site. This article examines the key pros and cons of hosting WordPress on Azure, explains the installation process, and explores four pro tips you can use to optimize your Azure-based WordPress site.
Azure is a platform for cloud computing that is available in software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) formats. You can use Azure to gain access to storage, computing, or networking resources as well as pre-built services like backends for web apps or machine learning tools.
Some of the most valuable features of Azure cloud services include:
When deciding which provider to host your site with, there are several pros and cons about Azure that you should consider.
The benefits of hosting on Azure resources include:
The downsides of hosting on Azure include:
Once you’ve decided that Azure is right for your site, or if you want to see what setup in Azure is like, you can take the following steps.
If you are new to Azure you can create a free, trial account to get started. This trial provides 12 months of access to Windows and Linux machines and up to 750 hours of computing time. This is roughly equal to a month of free hosting. The trial also grants access to 5Gb of storage, 250GB of SQL database, and 15GB of bandwidth.
After your account is created and verified, you can sign into the Azure Portal. If you already have an Azure account, you can sign in directly.
In the portal, from the main Dashboard, select the + button and choose to create a new resource. You should see a prompt allowing you to search the Azure Marketplace. There you can find pre-built WordPress configurations.
Select the setup you want and click Create.
Click Create.
Once your resource is selected you can define your desired configuration. After you are finished, select Create. Options to configure include:
From the Azure dashboard, you should be able to select your resource. You’ll then see a temporary URL of your WordPress site. Select the URL link to run the WordPress wizard.
Follow the wizard prompts, entering information as necessary. Once you’re finished, you can open your site to verify that it’s active.
Once your site is operational there are a few practices you can apply to optimize your performance.
When hosting your WordPress site on Azure, you gain fast loading speed, autoscaling according to traffic demands, built-in content delivery network (CDN), and high reliability. However, Azure pricing is often too high for users unable to purchase resources in bulk.
Additionally, the free database storage is typically not enough for good speed loads, and upgrading your database will cost you extra funds. To save on bandwidth costs, you can compress images. You can also reduce deployment requests to improve performance, and Azure CDN can automatically ensure users are served optimized content.
Change is the only constant, and the world is evolving every day with innovative ideas to enhance web-based platforms. Keeping track of these changes will help developers to stay updated with new technologies and current trends. Digging through each and every content might become very exhausting in the hustle of your everyday life. However, you can resort to newsletters to minimize the stress and get useful information from your desired influential industry.
In this article, we list the best newsletters that developers should subscribe to. They will provide you with invaluable information and impressive curated content.
Continue reading "Best Newsletters That Developers Should Subscribe To" →
I’ve just had a nice experience improving and modernizing a large JavaScript codebase in a WordPress plugin. The original code was written in an old-fashioned way with jQuery in a single large file. Using modern EcmaScript and tools like Webpack, I was able to split it into modules and improve the code structure. The new code is much more readable and maintainable, and of course, fewer bugs. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how I did that.
Continue reading "Modernizing JavaScript Code in WordPress" →
The Coronavirus crisis (COVID-19) is spreading all over the world. It affects all of us and our businesses. Your company might switch to work from home, and your sales might decrease. In this hard time, many companies are showing their generosity. They offer their products and services for free or at huge discounts to help people to get through this time.
Continue reading "Free resources for WordPress users during COVID-19" →
While choosing the best WordPress themes for your upcoming websites, it is critical to consider much more than simply its overall aesthetic appeal. Are you in search of an easy and effective way of building and customizing your WordPress site? You must consider using WordPress page builders that help you in creating, editing, and customizing your website layout but this does not involve writing any code. Let us explore the top page builder compatible WordPress themes.
Continue reading "Best WordPress Themes for Page Builders (2020)" →
Google Fonts is always a bottleneck for website performance. The Google Fonts' CSS is a render-blocking resource, which means that the browser won't render any processed content until the CSS is loaded. It also causes a blank space when the font is being loaded.
In the previous post of this series, I have shown you a way to get rid of these problems using a script from PerfPerfPerf. Since then, Google Fonts has some updates and the PerfPerfPerf's becomes outdated. And we need a better way to load Google Fonts now!
Before going into the solution, let's summarize 2 issues, as they are the most important problems with Google Fonts. And these are the problems we're going to resolve in this article.
When Google Fonts is being loaded, no further content (text, images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) is loaded. That means your whole page is blocked until Google Fonts finishes loading its CSS.
This problem is critical because it freezes your website when loading and increases the First Contentful Paint (FCP) of the page. FCP is an important, user-centric metric for measuring perceived load speed because it marks the first point in the page load timeline where the user can see anything on the screen—a fast FCP helps reassure the user that something is happening. It's a part of the Web Core Vitals and is an SEO factor. So if you have it high, your site might get a lower ranking.
Another problem with Google Fonts is that when it's being loaded, the text is completely vanished before your eyes. Only until it's finished loading, you can see the text. This effect is called FOIT (Flash Of Invisible Text).
That causes a really bad experience for your users. And if the loading time is huge, your users might think your website is broken (because they see nothing!).
And FOIT also affects the First Contentful Paint (FCP) as well, and thus might affect your search ranking.
To solve the 1st problem of render-blocking, we need to load Google Fonts asynchronously. That means we'll load the Google Fonts' CSS without blocking loading or rendering other resources.
There are 2 solutions:
rel="preload"preload is a mechanism to load resources without any effect on loading the other ones. It also puts a higher priority on the resources that are preloaded. That means these resources will be load before other resources. You can read more about this on MDN.
Let's assume you want to load Roboto font. Google gives you the HTML like this:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto" rel="stylesheet">
To make the CSS preloaded, you need to change it to:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto" rel="preload" as="style" onload="this.rel='stylesheet'">
The CSS is now preloaded. And when it finishes loading, it'll be applied.
The preload technique works well in all modern browsers.
Another solution is using media type, which is supported by all browsers. This technique is created by Filament Group. The HTML markup is simple as follows:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto" rel="stylesheet" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">
What it does is loads the CSS for the print-based media. In other words, the CSS is applied only when the users try to print the page. The loading process is now asynchronous (since we're on browsers). And when it's done, the CSS is applied for all media (which includes browsers).
I've been testing this technique for a while and see a good improvement in font loading. You can test on MetaBox.io and docs.metabox.io websites to see how it works.
font-display: swapTo solve the 2nd problem with a blank is when loading fonts, we need to use font-display: swap. Basically, it allows us to display the text first with a fallback font family (usually serif or sans-serif). And when the font is loaded, it swaps the text into the wanted font. This effect is called FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text). Unlike FOIT (Flash Of Invisible Text), users still see the text while the font is loaded. So, the user experience is better. And also the FCP (First Contentful Paint) is lower.
The good news is Google Fonts now supports font-display: swap by default. You can see it in the font URL like this:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
Notice the display=swap in the URL. The CSS loaded for the font will have font-display: swap.
This technique works in all modern browsers, and it's safe to use.
Just a note that the solution in the 1st part of this series, which uses PerfPerfPerf script, tries to add font-display: swap to the Google Fonts' CSS. It's not needed anymore.
So the final code to load Google fonts now is either of these:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto&display=swap" rel="preload" as="style" onload="this.rel='stylesheet'"> <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto&display=swap" rel="stylesheet" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">
The best way to apply the techniques above is adding the code into your theme's header.php file. Or you can create a child theme and modify the header.php file. So your header.php file will look like this:
<!doctype html>
<html <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head>
<meta charset="<?php bloginfo( 'charset' ); ?>">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto&display=swap" rel="stylesheet" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">
<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>
// Other code
I find it's harder to do this if you use page builders. You need to disable default Google Fonts and apply the code above. The only plugin I found that disables the Google Fonts is Autoptimize. Unfortunately, it removes our manual link tag, too.
The best solution for page builders is using Autoptimize to preload the Google Fonts. You can turn it on the settings page:
You can see it in action on GretaThemes website.
After applying the new techniques to our websites, I'm quite happy with the result. The loading speed is increased and the FOUT effect is minimal. Users probably don't notice the font change (swapping). And of course, the Google PageSpeed Insights score is higher than before (in my test for MetaBox.io's homepage, it has 100 scores for desktops).
I think optimizing the loading speed for Google Fonts is very important for both users and search engines. And you should do it now. Feel free to discuss this with us on the Facebook group, or leave a comment below.