Performance Archives - Steve Grunwell

Getting started with AMP for WordPress

May 2, 2016

Late last year, Google and other organizations rolled out the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, with the goal of introducing lightweight, lightning-fast content for users on mobile devices. AMP is essentially a subset of HTML and scripts – optimized for caching and performance – designed to speed up the mobile web and to make content accessible to every user, regardless of connection speed or strength.

A few months ago, 10up President Jake Goldman published What Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) means for Consumers, Publishers, and the Future, a piece that has helped spark a lot of interest in Accelerated Mobile Pages among 10up’s clientele, a group lined with major publishers and news outlets. In the article, Goldman concludes that publishers “in a crowded or hotly contested news space, or seeing meaningful traffic to stories from Google, need to quickly prioritize AMP HTML.”

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Quick Tip: JavaScript Resize Timer

December 29, 2014

In Code

I wanted to share a little trick that I use a lot when building responsive sites that can be a huge help for your front-end performance, which I call the “resize timer”:

Imagine the following scenario: you have a series of horizontally-aligned boxes on your page, which should be equal height. Of course, this is easy to pull off with Flexbox, but browser support isn’t exactly where we want it just yet. Use it where you can, of course, but you might still need a JavaScript-based fallback for older browsers.

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Using Git Checksums to Invalidate Browser Caches

August 29, 2012

In Code

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the new, open-source version of this site and have been looking for opportunities to experiment with things I’d have little reason to do on client sites. For instance, I wanted to see if I could get the current git checksum as a string using PHP (without resorting to shell commands) so that I could display it in the comments of my WordPress template. Once I was able to achieve that, I took it one step further and used it to invalidate browsers’ cached versions of my scripts and styles anytime I made an update to the theme.

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