How to Fix “Avoid an Excessive DOM Size” in WordPress: A Practical Guide

The PageSpeed recommendation to “avoid an excessive DOM size” is a tricky one for WordPress site owners. There isn’t a plugin that can magically fix this for you. You, the site owner, will need to make some changes to your content.

Most of the articles you’ll find on this topic are going to go into the technical things to do which aren’t possible for non-developers. However, this guide is a practical one for WordPress site owners.

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How to Install and Set Up WP Rocket

I’ve been working with WP Rocket’s support team for a number of years, so I’m not only intimately familiar with the plugin, but I’ve also seen a lot of mistakes that customers make when they attempt to use it.

Even though it’s one of the easiest WordPress caching plugins to use, speed optimization is inherently technical and complex. It’s common to get confused or overwhelmed when using optimization plugins.

But here you have the “ultimate” guide, from the horse’s mouth. Even if you don’t use WP Rocket specifically, many of the guidelines apply to caching plugins in general.

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What is zxcvbn.min.js in WordPress?

Whenever a user creates a password for their account in WordPress, by default you see a meter telling you how strong your password is:

You may see this both on the backend, for example in the Edit User screen, and on the front end, for example when WooCommerce customers create an account in your shop.

This password strength meter feature is handled automatically by a few files, one of them being: zxcvbn.min.js

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How to Migrate from DesktopServer to Local

Now that DesktopServer has sadly closed down, it’s time to move to another tool for working with WordPress locally. I’m going to be using Local (formerly Local by Flywheel) for now.

Fortunately it’s easy to migrate from DesktopServer to Local.

Local has an import tool and it just requires a zip file with your site files and your database.
This is exactly how DesktopServer’s export feature creates backups.

So first we’ll use DesktopServer to create the backup file. Then we’ll import it into Flywheel.

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How to Sync WooCommerce Products Between Sites

Sync WordPress Content

When you are working with a WordPress development or staging site in conjunction with a live site, there are often times when you just want to migrate a couple of products, for example, from staging to live, without re-migrating the whole site. Or you may be looking for a way to keep products synchronized between your sites.

While there are some tools, like WP Migrate DB (pro), that let you sync databases pretty easily, that can be overkill for some situations, and they tend to be more developer-centric.

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