W-Shadow.com

It is hardly news that the average load time is one of the many factors that Google uses to determine how well your site will rank. But how much does it matter, really? If my recent experience is anything to go by, the answer is “very little”. Over the last two months, I optimized this […]

In my previous post, The Quest For Speed, I mentioned that lazy-loading avatars is a good way to improve your site performance: The overwhelming majority of visitors never leave a comment. Chances are, most don’t even scroll down to the comments section. So why waste their time and bandwidth by loading avatars that they’ll never […]

A little more than a month ago, I logged into my Google Webmaster Tools account and to check if Google had detected any crawl errors or any other problems with my site. Finding everything in good order, I was just about to close the browser tab when I noticed a sidebar link that had somehow […]

Have you ever wondered how those domain suggestion sites can check so many domain names so quickly? This is how. Below I’ve listed three techniques for checking domain availability. They’re ordered (loosely) from fastest/cheapest/least accurate to slowest/priciest/most accurate. Ideally, you would run each domain through all three in order, and only assume it’s available if […]

If you run a WordPress site, chances are that you use plugins. If you use plugins, chances are that some of those plugins add their JavaScript or CSS files to your pages. And if there’s lots of JS/CSS on your pages, chances are that your site isn’t as fast as it could be, and that […]