Reduce unused JavaScript in WordPress

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.

What does “reduce unused JavaScript” mean?

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.

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Improve the mobile speed of your WordPress site

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:

  • Why mobile performance is typically worse
  • The primary cause of slow mobile pages
  • How to create mobile-specific versions of your pages
  • How to remove unnecessary files from your mobile pages

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.

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Learn How to Make Your Site More Inclusive with the Accessibility Checker Plugin

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.

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How to avoid enormous network payloads in WordPress

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. You may also see this referred to as page size or page weight.

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!

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How To Back Up Your WordPress Site To Dropbox

Last Updated on January 24, 2021.

Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. There are a lot of possibilities out there, but the following have served me well over the years. I usually only have to use them on shared hosting plans. Some of my sites are on managed WordPress hosts who take care of backups as part of the plan.

Here are my criteria for a backup solution:

  1. Ability to back up both database and files
  2. Ability to schedule these backups separately – I haven’t found too many situations where a full file backup is needed as frequently as the database backup
  3. Offers backup to an off-site 3rd party. You don’t want to keep backups on your server because if something goes wrong with the server, your backups could be lost. Backups sent via email are usually only realistic for the database, full site backups would be too large to email.

My preferred solution is to backup sites to my DropBox account. You can get 2GB of storage with a free account.

I typically use one of the following 2 plugins to back up my sites:

Both are free plugins that meet the criteria described above.

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2 Ways To Sell Using PayPal and WordPress

Sell Products With PayPal And WordPress

Last Updated on November 28, 2020.

There are many, many ways to sell things from your WordPress site, from physical products to digital downloads or access to content. The best solution will depend on your particular circumstance and needs. While WordPress can get quite sophisticated in the ecommerce department, a lot of folks just want to be able to sell a few items quickly and easily using PayPal.

In scenarios like this where the user wants the simplest possible solution and knows they want to use PayPal, a fully featured shopping cart / ecommerce solution such as WooCommerce might be overkill. Sometimes simple PayPal buttons will suffice.

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