This month we had a bit of show and tell from Ron Stoloff on one of the sites he works on – https://wissahickondems.com/. We discussed loading of images and on-page anchors.

Ron noted that some of his images are loaded from the website, while others are loaded from 3rd party sites.
The concept of a Content Delivery Network – CDN – was introduced as a way to gain some performance improvements for loading images. Cloudflare offers a very good solution for spreading out the distribution of your content across the internet.
We mentioned optimizing images in advance of uploading them to your WordPress website, or optimizing them during the process of uploading. Optimizing the image means that the image is being correctly sized for display on a website. Realize that with today’s smart phones and digital cameras you can create images in the 12 MB to 25 MB by default. Displaying an image of this size on your website provides little to no value to your website visitor.
The photo should be resized, and compressed so that it is more appropriately sized for web display.
A WordPress plugin – Compress JPEG & PNG images – will compress your photo on the fly as it is being uploaded to your website. There is a companion website – TinyPNG – that enables you to compress the image in advance of uploading it to your website. The service is available for free, with a premium option permitting a larger number of images to be compressed at one time.
After the Show & Tell, we did a quick dive into WP CLI – the WordPress Command Line Interface. We reviewed a few basic commands and showed a couple of options on how to make an SSH connection to your web server.
Basic commands reviewed
- Update core
wp core version wp core update
- Update plugins
wp plugin list wp plugin update <my-plugin> wp plugin update --all
- Update theme
wp theme list wp theme update twentynineteen wp theme update --all
- Install plugin
wp plugin install duplicate-post
More to come. Stay tuned.
Resources listed: