Audience: Intermediate

Intermediate tutorials may include code modifications, or use of tools like FTP. If you’re not a full-on developer, but you’re also not scared of getting your hands dirty, these tutorials are good for you :)

Cookie Consent and Privacy Plugins for WordPress

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate
WordPress Plugins

Cookie banners are an unavoidable part of our web browsing experience these days. As much as we hate them as users, site owners need them to not only demonstrate to visitors that they have privacy options and to build trust, but to make sure they are complying with a variety of laws.

It’s a tricky world because the average site owner is not a lawyer but it feels like we have to become one to understand what is required of us.

You might think that your site doesn’t require a cookie plugin, but the vast majority will. Common features like Google Analytics (pretty much any Google product in fact), Facebook tracking pixels and more all indicate the need for cookie consent. This article does a good job of breaking this down in more detail. And PrivacyChecker has some useful articles on their blog.

There are so many options for WordPress plugins that manage cookie consent. Many are freemium, meaning there is a free version with paid upgrades, but I know most site owners, especially of smaller non-monetized sites, won’t want to add yet another subscription to their website maintenance costs.

I’ve tested many of the available plugins and and found that there’s only a few free options worth looking at, along with a couple of Premium.

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Speed Optimization Case Study – SBWineLiner

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate
Speed Optimization

This is a case study for SBWineLiner.com which is quite a new site and doesn’t yet get a huge amount of traffic. Core Web Vitals are not yet available so PageSpeed scores and user experience are what I was optimizing for.

The goal for this site was to make the mobile version faster since clients are using the site while on the wine tour and therefore not always with the best reception and connection.

Although the site performed decently, the mobile Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores for most pages were generally not great and had a lot of room for improvement.

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WP Rocket vs. Perfmatters

Audience: Intermediate
Speed Optimization

There is significant overlap between WP Rocket and Perfmatters, but that doesn’t mean you have to choose one or the other. The differences are important too. You can certainly use both simultaneously as long as you avoid feature duplication. In other cases, depending on your preferences, you may find that it makes sense to use one or the other. Let’s look at the specifics that will influence your decision.

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Improve Elementor LCP Metric With One Change

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate
Speed Optimization

While working at WP Rocket I saw so many Elementor customers struggling with a slow LCP metric, especially on mobile, due to their full-width “hero” images.

These full-width images at the top of the page often have text or other elements positioned over them, so most of the time this effect is accomplished in Elementor by using a background image on the container element.

While this looks great on the frontend of the site, it can often be damaging for the LCP score.

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Preconnect to Required Origins in WordPress

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate
Speed Optimization

Preconnect to required origins is a PageSpeed recommendation that you may see if your site loads files from external domains. It can be satisfied by adding either preconnect or dns-prefetch directives to your page.

preconnect and dns-prefetch are types of “resource hints” which are used to try and speed up the loading of files hosted on 3rd party domains.

Resource hints are small pieces of HTML that are added to the page, to communicate to the browser to start specific tasks as soon as possible.

This is what resource hints look like in the HTML of a page:

<link rel='dns-prefetch' href='//fonts.googleapis.com' />
<link href='https://fonts.gstatic.com' crossorigin rel='preconnect' />Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Don’t get this confused with preload, another type of resource hint, which is used for specific files.

In this article I’ll explain the difference between preconnect and prefetch, which you should use, and how to add these to your site.

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