I recently started a new project, using a NodeJS backend (with the NestJS framework). Because this is a personal project, and I don’t have that VC investment money behind me, I had to look for a hosting service that would be cheap, didn’t require a ton of configuration, and ideally one that would scale with…Read More
Author: Nicholas Harris
Content Analyzer Development
Yes, the name “Content Analyzer” sounds boring. It’s the internal name for a new software product I’m working on, which (like the name entails) helps customers analyze and find areas of improvement in their WordPress blogs. Content Analyzer will connect to customers’ WordPress website’s to scan their post & pages, determine metrics like word count,…Read More
Higher-Order React Hooks
As part of the next step in learning React, I’ve been moving the business logic for one of the components I made early on into a custom hook. The component I’m refactoring displays a table, along with controls for pagination and filtering. I moved the logic for sending the request to the custom hook, along…Read More
Finding and Fixing Layout Shifts/CLS Issues
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on fixing Cumulative Layout Shift issues for my clients. CLS is a factor in the Core Web Vitals Google introduced in May 2020, used to measure a user’s experience related to the performance of a website. Layout shifts negatively affect a user’s experience, which is why Google…Read More
web-vitals vs Lighthouse vs PageSpeed Insights – What’s the Difference?
There are quite a few different libraries out there that can help with measuring your Site Speed, specifically Google’s Core Web Vitals standards. The primary three tools that are are commonly used and set the standards are web-vitals, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights. Each tool/library in the list is connected to the one before it. web-vitals…Read More
Google Search Console Showing High CLS But PageSpeed Insights Shows Good Score
So you’ve asked a plugin provider/your theme designer/ads provider to fix CLS issues that you think their services are causing on your website. They’ve updated their software, run some tests with PageSpeed Insights, and you’re ecstatic – your CLS has dropped to 0.05, virtually non-existent! A month goes by, and you login to Google Search…Read More
Using AMP Pages to Boost your Mobile Performance
Site Speed Having a slow site can be a real headache, and unlike many issues it isn’t something that can be solved with a single change. And in some cases, a website can be so “heavy” that the only solution is to pay much, much more for better server resources. Impact on SEO Performance Something…Read More
How to get the intrinsic coordinates on an image mouse click
I’m currently working on a program that can generate a customizable image report. It needs to allow the user to click on areas in an image to specify certain areas used when generating the report. One method of doing this would be to use a two dimensional drawing library, like Two.js. Unfortunately, these libraries require…Read More
Score Doesn’t Matter – How to Sanity-Check Your GTMetrix Report
I commonly see people running a site speed test through GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights and panic when they receive a “bad” score. However, in most cases, the score does not directly relate to how quickly your website actually loads. A great example of this can be seen with the following two sites (site URLs…Read More
How to Script Interactions With a Website
As part of the process for clients signing up for a service for The Blog Fixer, they must create an administrator for us with the correct permissions that allow us to install plugins and take backups. When we do free promotions, as many as half of everyone who signs up for the promotion never end…Read More