Critical Path CSS
I've been looking at Critical Path CSS again as I work trying to improve the performance of this blog. The idea behind Critical Path CSS (from now on, just Critical Path) is that we inline the CSS...
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Working With WordPress Development and Staging Environments
Although I've always thought about staging environments as clones of production systems, I understand the need to do things differently in production than in staging or development. This would be no...
Gulp and AVIF, part 2
Using the default encoder and settings, as described in Compressing AVIF images with Gulp, got the task running and produced the result we wanted: AVIF images that were smaller than the source image...
Compressing AVIF images with Gulp
Now that AVIF support is enabled by default in Chrome stable (85) and Firefox (behind a flag) we really should look at how to encode images to AVIF as part of a build workflow. In my normal workflow,...
Is performance all that matters?
One thing that has struck me over the last few years is our obsession with fast. The faster, the better, right? I've become interested in how do we define fast and whether performance is the only...
Using PageSpeed Insights during development
Sometimes it's good to have performance data results as we build our projects. It tells us what we need to work on and where we can tweak things to improve performance. PageSpeed Insights provides...
Working with OpenType Features on the web
Warning The support for these features depends on the browser and not all browsers support all the features discussed below. Check the corresponding entries on caniuse.com or MDN to ensure the...
Passing flags and arguments to Gulp
There are times when we want to do different things based on whether we're creating code for production or development. This is based on the example from the Gulp documentation. We'll use this as the...
Automating WordPress Translations
One of the strong points of WordPress is that it's easy to translate the tool itself. As discussed in Translating WordPress Themes the process for translating WordPress elements is as follows: Add a...
Google fonts way of serving variable fonts
One of the biggest pain points of variable fonts was that they were not available in font CDNs like Google Fonts. In October 2019, Google released the new version of its API that supported variable...