It’s a good practice to remove unused themes so that you don’t have to maintain them with updates for security purposes.
If a theme is installed on your site, it means all the files still exist on your server. That means the code could still be exploited, even if the theme isn’t active. So you either have to maintain the updates for the theme, or you should just remove it.
If you write long tutorials and guides, a table of contents can help your readers more easily navigate, get a sense of the content that’s coming, and find what they are looking for.
Here are a couple of plugins I like for adding a table of contents to posts.
Most WordPress site owners will see the recommendation to “reduce unused Javascript” when they run a PageSpeed test.
The technically complete solution is out of reach for most site owners, but there is an effective shortcut solution for reducing unused JavaScript on your WordPress site that I share below.
JavaScript (JS) is a type of code used on website mostly for interactive elements like sliders, animations etc. Compared to CSS or images, it is much more resource intensive so it takes longer to process when your page is loading. It’s especially bad for mobile performance.
For best performance, you should aim to have as little JavaScript as possible on your site.
Loading JavaScript that isn’t even used on the page is a waste of resources and processing power, and that’s what this PageSpeed recommendation is getting at.
If you’ve ever run a PageSpeed or other speed test for the mobile version of your site, you’ve undoubtedly been horrified by the low speed and score compared to the desktop version of your site.
In this post I’ll explain:
Optimizing for mobile does take a bit of extra effort since site owners are usually “retrofitting” their sites for mobile performance.
If you are starting a new site, it will be easier if you consider mobile performance from the start, and make it a priority.
Accessibility is something that I’m really into… in theory. I believe everyone should have full access to the internet no matter what challenges they face or if they are using different devices to navigate and access the web.
But in reality I have not put as much work into this as I need to. So when I received the pitch email about the Accessibility Checker plugin, I thought it was a good opportunity to figure out just how badly I’m sucking at this, and find a starting point to try to address some of the issues.
If you are using Google PageSpeed Insights to test your WordPress site, you’ll see this “avoid enormous network payloads” warning if the total size of your page is more than 1.6MB.
It sounds technical, but this is actually one of the recommendations that you as the site owner have the most control over. Unlike some PageSpeed recommendations, you can fix this one!
