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Archive for June, 2021

Best Multilingual SEO Practices & Tactics for 2021

June 3rd, 2021 No comments

The internet has long been successful in erasing international boundaries. Businesses no longer need to limit themselves to a city or a country.

They can expand and grab as many customers as they want around the world. During the COVID era, this is a blessing for many business owners.

However, that means you have to be able to communicate with different consumers around the world, especially those who speak a language besides English. Many entrepreneurs are quick to make the most of this opportunity. They have created multilingual websites and implemented multilingual SEO practices to appeal to a wider consumer base.

It’s time for you to do the same and engage with the global market.

If you are overwhelmed about what this entails, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’ll be diving deeper into some multilingual SEO best practices and tactics you’ll need in 2021. 

But before we discuss any strategies, let’s start with how a multilingual website can benefit your business. 

Ready to get started?

Why Do You Need a Multilingual Website?

For an online business owner, a website helps acquire more customers than owning just a brick-and-mortar store. However, a multilingual website gives you the upper hand. It offers a greater opportunity to become more successful than your competitors.

As the name suggests, a multilingual website has content in more than one language. It has the potential to transform your business and allows you to interact with more people. As you connect better with your international audience, you can develop better relationships with potential customers. 

Moreover, a multilingual website can simultaneously improve brand awareness and help build a stronger online presence. It can also enhance credibility and professionalism.

What Are the Advantages of a Multilingual Website?

This year, it’s going to be about the survival of the fittest. Even as the third wave swells, the online commercial landscape continues to become an increasingly crowded space. That means you’re going to have to stand out in the crowd and grab as many customers as possible. More importantly, you’re going to have to do whatever it takes to keep your customers as happy as possible. 

Here are a few reasons you should consider including a multilingual website into your digital marketing strategy in 2021 and how it can benefit your business.

1. Connect with a larger consumer base

Many of us believe that English is the most commonly spoken language. So a website in English should be the ideal way to connect with most of the world’s population. However, this is not necessarily true. 

According to Statista, only 25.9% of internet users speak English. That means you’re not reaching around 75% of the people!

Source

A multi-language website can instantly increase your ability to communicate with a larger target audience.

2. Aligning with consumer preferences

Offering content in a local language means you are personalizing your website to cater to the needs of your customers. As hbr.org points out, 72.4% of customers prefer to buy a product or service from a website that offers information in their own language. 

3. Helps boost sales

CSA research claims that nearly 72% of consumers spend their time on websites in their language. That means the bounce rate decreases as people spend more time on your website if it’s in their language. And the longer they stay the chances of a conversion increases.

More importantly, more customers equal more sales. According to W3Lab, adding another language to your website has the potential to increase sales by 100%.

4. Offers a competitive advantage

As cross-border e-commerce picks up, your multilingual website can help make your business more competitive. You can interact with customers your competitors are not reaching, and increase conversions.

Furthermore, a multilingual website means you can communicate with consumers in another country. So it’s a great cost-effective international digital marketing strategy for your eCommerce brand. 

What are the Advantages of Multilingual SEO?

Nowadays, businesses are concerned about being visible in search. They understand that in order to show up in search results, they need to invest in SEO. If you’ve invested in a multilingual website, it only makes sense that you’ll take your efforts to the next level- and invest in multilingual SEO.

Much like your ordinary website, your multilingual website’s online success depends on being discovered on foreign search engines. To be successful, you need to rank high on SERPs where consumers are more likely to click on you.

Multilingual Search Engine Optimization can help optimize your website in multiple languages. So it comes as no surprise that to rank high on SERPs in a foreign language, you will need to apply a little more than the SEO tactics you’re using for your current website. 

First, you should translate your website’s content, including the metadata. You will also need to create unique URLs with language-specific subdomains. 

Additionally, to increase your site’s visibility with local users, you will need to identify keywords in the respective language. A website that is normal SEO-optimized can lose visibility in the country-specific search engines.

However, there is more to it than keywords. Every language has its differences, whether that’s the writing style, colloquial speech, sentence structure, or terminologies. 

By implementing these simple multilingual SEO tactics, you can make your website more scannable for search engine bots and boost rankings. There are several SEO tools to help simplify this task. However, if this is not your cup of tea, hire a reliable and professional SEO agency that can help with additional multilingual SEO practices, especially link building.

Which Type of Websites Can Benefit from Multilingual SEO?

Some companies are more likely than others to invest in a multilingual website. They need to offer a localized version of their website or products. 

The following are examples of businesses that can benefit the most from it:

1. Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism

Travelers need to be able to find information that they can understand about other destinations. Your translated website can become the perfect source of information for:

  • Visa application fees and procedures
  • Accommodation: hotels, guest houses, etc.
  • Transportation: planes, buses, trains, rent-a-cars, etc. 
  • Landmarks, sightseeing attractions, local fairs, etc.

With access to up-to-date information, more travelers will be interested in booking tours with you and using your services.

For example, notice how Airbnb uses global gateways on its international site. The drop-down box allows users to select their language from a scrolling list. 

Source

2. International Ecommerce

Businesses are now expanding to incorporate the international market. However, in order to promote international trade, you need to provide information about products in the correct language. 

People now prefer accessing information in their own language over price. It is a key factor in creating a better UX for your customers. 

For example, Ron Dorff, a French-Swedish sportswear brand, expanded their reach from a French audience to an international one. Consumers from the UK, USA, and Germany drive almost 70% of its sales.

In fact, wholesale importers and exporters have more to gain from a multi-language website than retailers. It can help open up new markets and revenue streams.

3. News Sites and Magazines

People around the world typically speak more than one language. Many prefer to consume content in the local language when it comes to news, information, and entertainment. More importantly, it encourages people to interact with your website. Online newspapers and magazines can help cater to the needs of a wider target audience. 

For instance, like numerous other multilingual news websites, BBC offers its readers several language options to ensure that readers are engaged with their content.

Source

4. Digital Products

It’s a lot easier for businesses that offer digital products and services to branch out in other countries. By localizing your offerings, you can sell to any client at any time.

For instance, SaaS SEO agencies can effortlessly provide solutions in a focused niche. Quick Sprout, a SaaS company founded by Neil Patel, saw a 47% increase in search traffic simply by translating his blog into multiple languages.

5. e-Learning

COVID-19 is taking distance learning to the next level. This industry has already reached a worth of $37 billion. People all over the world now want access to the best e-learning courses. And language should not become a barrier.

A multilingual e-Learning platform provides accessibility, a personalized experience, security, and a complete learning solution. 

What are the Challenges of Multilingual Websites and Multilingual SEO?

If you’re still reading this blog, that means you’re well on your way to developing a multilingual website for your business. Congratulations!

However, like everything else in the digital world, there will be a few challenges. But I’m guessing you’re a staunch fighter- after all, you’re still thriving in this pandemic! So I know you’re not one to give up that easily.

What can you expect when dealing with a multilingual website and multilingual SEO strategies?

1. Aligning with Linguistic And Cultural Suitability

Each country is linguistically and culturally diverse. Ensuring that all the copy and graphics are as persuasive and attractive to the audiences in each target country can get a little challenging.

2. Matching Local Preferences and Tastes

While it’s important to localize your website, not every country’s audience has the same interests. For example, an eCommerce website may experience different demands for the same products. You may need to clear stockpiles, but you will need to include different prices in the local currency and shipping fees. 

3. Content Organization

The direction in which content is written impacts web design. For instance, most people read and write from left to right (LTR). However, content on Arabic or Hebrew websites is read the other way. Developers must arrange design and other website elements accordingly.

4. Additional Characters

Languages often have different scripts and special characters. This will require additional coding.

5. Latency

A local hosting service that gets the bulk of its traffic from a foreign country may experience some performance problems.

6. Duplicate Content

If all web page elements and content isn’t completely translated, it may appear in the source language. Google sees this as duplicate content and will punish you for having it on your website. 

Over to You

It’s time to expand your business and reach out to global consumers. One of the easiest ways to do that is to create a website with multilingual capabilities. It can help you connect with more people and boost sales.

This may sound challenging at first. However, armed with multilingual SEO best practices and the right tools, you’ll be on the road to success in no time at all. A world of customers awaits you, so make sure to optimize your website for international audiences.

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All you need to know about Social Champ – [Review]

June 2nd, 2021 No comments

When friends get together and build an app of their dreams, amazing applications like Social Champ are born! 

Social Champ is a social media management tool for small and medium-sized businesses, solo entrepreneurs, and agencies. Social Champ has support for all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and Pinterest. 

What is Social Champ?

You can create, edit, manage, design, and schedule social media posts using one content dashboard. Social Champ also allows you to engage with your audience, track analytics, and create reports for all socials. 

Social Champ is mainly a customer-centric tool, so they keep on releasing small and extensive features at all times. Thanks to their customer support team, you can also request the next features and include them in their roadmap! 

Their UI is quite vibrant and easy to navigate, which makes using the tool a complete breeze. You can find all the primary and secondary features in the menu on the left side. 

Even signing up for Social Champ is very easy; all you need to do is input your email address and name! Once you are done, Social Champ asks you about your company, and you are good to go. This information helps the tool suggest better RSS feeds for you and set your account. 

Key Features of Social Champ 

Coming on to the features, Social Champ has several fantastic social media automation features, including; 

  • Social Media Calendar 
  • Auto RSS feed
  • Bulk Upload and Scheduling 
  • Sentiment Analysis 
  • Monitoring Analytics 
  • Team Collaboration 
  • Chrome Extension 
  • Content Curation 
  • Custom Curated Posts 
  • Mobile Apps
  • Content Suggestions 
  • Recycle 
  • Repeat 
  • Post Approval 
  • Workspace 
  • Link Shortner 
  • Queue 
  • Tracking 
  • Hashtag Manager 
  • Canva integration

All these features enable social media managers to automate their daily tasks and schedule their entire content calendars at once. Here are a few of the star features that are our favorite. 

Bulk Upload 

Bulk upload is one of the most valuable features of all time. It allows you to upload up to 200 posts at once using a single CSV file. All you need to do is create a sheet with captions, images, URLs, and hashtags. Social Champ will further do everything on its own. 

It will check your sheet for any issues or bugs and notify you to make changes. Once the sheet is 100% correct, Social Champ will schedule all the posts for you! 

Auto RSS Feed 

Connect your favorite blogs and websites to your social accounts to keep them active at all times. Once you post something on the blog, it will automatically go up on your social media accounts. 

You can always connect your blog with socials, but you can also connect other websites from content suggestions. The content suggestion tab helps you shortlist relevant blogs and websites according to your business type. 

With the Auto RSS Feed, you can also set the frequency and time of posts or add them to the queue. 

Social Media Calendar 

A calendar view of all published and scheduled posts for easy management. 

With the Social Media Calendar, you can also create and edit existing posts and identify the best-performing post. The calendar allows you to organize and streamline all the posts neatly and aesthetically so that you can view the entire month’s worth of content in one place. 

You can also filter posts based on either future, sent, and failed posts or according to a specific platform. 

Tracking & Monitoring Analytics 

Track and analyze all your posts with platform-centric reports and identify your best-performing posts. The tracking and analytics option will help you create better content strategies in the future as it will show you what content resonates with your audience best and what gets the most engagement. 

The feature is particularly useful for presentations as all the reports have gorgeous graphs for all platforms, making tracking even more effortless. Lastly, white-label all reports to give them a personalized effect with logos and names and download them in a PDF format. 

The analytics feature also enables you to compare reports weekly and monthly and learn your audience’s behavior. 

Team Collaboration 

Team Collaboration is one powerhouse of a feature. It allows you to collaborate with your team members without sharing credentials. You can assign them roles, such as admin, editor, and author. Each position has its own responsibilities and permissions according to which they can perform the tasks. 

With this feature, you no longer need to create each and every post yourself. Your team can even help you with content curation. Instead, you can ask your writer to do it themselves. To ensure that your brand voice is consistent and that there are no issues in the scheduled content, you can cross-check all the posts. 

Each time your team member schedules a post, you will receive a push notification for post-approval. 

Why Social Champ?

Honestly, I am more than happy to answer this question. Social Champ is a customer-centric tool, which means that the customer support executives actually listen to your feedback and recommendations and reply accordingly.

Unlike other tools, they don’t send a computerized reply to everyone. They take time to listen to your issues and find a solution that is sure to help you out. 

Due to popular demand, they released a new Canva integration a few weeks back. It helps the user design eye-catching posts from within the content composer. 

Here are some more reasons to use Social Champ:

  • Extremely budget-friendly, with plans starting from as low as $10/month. 
  • Feature updates almost every month. 
  • Amazing integrations, including Canva, bit.ly, and more. 
  • Chrome extension to share images and text directly from the web. 

Who can benefit from Social Champ the most?

The honest answer? Everyone!

Social Champ has pricing plans for all businesses and enterprises, including individual entrepreneurs and even agencies. Basically, anyone who is looking for quality social media automation can make use of this tool! 

With their new onboarding features, it is even easier to set up your account and get the hang of the tool. 

Pricing Plans 

Social Champ has four pricing plans to cater to everyone. Here are the details;

  • Professional, starting from $10/month 
  • Champ, starting from $29/month 
  • Business, starting from $99/month 
  • Agency, starting from $199/month 

Additionally, if you buy a yearly subscription, you can receive a 10% off on all plans! 

Final Thoughts 

Using Social Champ for social media management and marketing is as easy as it gets. The UI is gorgeous, the response rate is pretty fast, ample features, and the pricing plans are as reasonable as it gets! 

If they could just work on a few glitches here and there, they have the potential to be the best in the market. I, however, would stick to this tool. Not only because I am used to it, but also because it has a lot of potential.

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Is It Time to Reset HTML?

June 2nd, 2021 No comments

HTML is one of the foundational building blocks of the Web. But just as web design best practices and techniques change over time, so does the code we use. As HTML evolves, some of its older markup has been deprecated while other parts have been repurposed.

Does that create more problems for us, though? Would we be better off starting over so we can make sure we’re all working from the same language rather than trying to edit out the bits we don’t want or need?

Problems With Holding Onto Legacy HTML

Let’s take a look at what happens when we amend the rules of HTML over time and how it impacts the Web:

1. It’s Risky to Leave Deprecated HTML Behind

Whether certain features have become outdated and need to go, or browsers have stopped supporting certain tags altogether, deprecated code eventually becomes a problem.

You’ll find a long list of deprecated HTML on the HTML.com website:

For many of these, HTML tags and attributes have been replaced by more efficient CSS styling. There are also examples of HTML deprecation because the features have become outdated (like frames).

Yet, there are still websites out there that contain deprecated HTML.

In some cases, the HTML sits silently on the other side of the website. If there’s enough of this errant code hanging around, though, those extra characters and directives could slow down your server’s processing time and render pages more slowly than usual.

In other cases, the HTML breaks features on the front-end of a website. Take, for instance, this warning from Mozilla regarding the tag:

Using deprecated code can create inconsistent and poor experiences on the front-end. And when all browsers finally get on board and decide not to support an HTML tag anymore, all visitors will be left with a broken UI.

So, while it’s great that HTML5 has deprecated legacy HTML that’s no longer useful or necessary, that’s not to stop everyone from using it or leaving it behind on older websites. 

2. Legacy Code Focuses on Style; Not Semantics

As I mentioned, a lot of deprecated HTML has been phased out and replaced by CSS styling. And that’s a good thing.

Let me give you a simple example of this…

My favorite book is The Stand by Stephen King. The first time I read it, I didn’t sleep for three days. Thankfully, when I revisit it every year, I have fewer nightmares and can more greatly appreciate the storytelling aspect of it.

In the above paragraph, I’ve used the tag to italicize several words.

In the early days of HTML, stood for “italics” (the way stood for “bold”). With HTML5, however, will still render as italics, but its semantic meaning isn’t as broad. It’s been repurposed to indicate a stylistic change, which is important for things like book and film names, foreign words, and so on. To express emphasis, we use the  tag instead. 

Keeping the legacy  and  tags can lead to issues, though. 

In the statement above, I’ve italicized the name of the book (The Stand) as well as the number of sleepless nights I had (three days) with. Whether the designer decides today, tomorrow or ten months down the road that they want to change the way literary or cinematic references are styled, my choice of HTML will stand in their way.

Because all of my italic text is indicated by , styles can’t universally be applied to specific content (like book references). Instead, the designer would have to go through and clean up my code so that it looks like this:

My favorite book is The Stand by Stephen King. The first time I read it, I didn’t sleep for three days. Thankfully, when I inevitably revisit it every year, I have fewer nightmares and can more greatly appreciate the storytelling aspect of it.

This would then allow the semantically italicized content to remain intact while the designer or developer adjusts the styles of the book title here and across the site. (Though, really, the first italicized phrase should be surrounded by  as it would be more semantically accurate.)

While it’s great that we’ve created guidelines for using legacy HTML today, keeping old code around can confuse writers, designers, and others who are familiar with the previous way of formatting content. By resetting HTML, throwing out old styles, and creating one language we use consistently across the web, we won’t create more work for ourselves later on.

3. Deprecated Code Hinders Accessibility

Another big reason why repurposed and deprecated HTML is a problem is because of accessibility.

For starters, when you leave deprecated and unsupported code behind, it’s likely to cause issues for screen readers, search engines, and browsers that use HTML for clues about the content.

Header tags (e.g.

, 

, 

), for instance, aren’t just used to visibly break up large chunks of text. Header tags and, more specifically their hierarchy, present important information about the relationship between subjects on a page — and this is the kind of thing that screen readers and search engines pick up on.

That’s why we need to be very careful about the code we leave behind the scenes, even if readers on the front end can’t visibly see it. Let’s look at an example of how this can affect accessibility:

Is there an à la carte menu or is it just prix fixe tonight?

If a screen reader were to read over this sentence, the French phrases would be said with the same emphasis as any other italicized words on the page.

This is why HTML5 encourages semantic coding instead of purely stylistic.

The proper way to write HTML in the line above would be:

Is there an à la carte menu or is it just prix fixe tonight?

There are two reasons to do this:

  1. To indicate to screen readers that there’s a language change.
  2. To make it easier for designers or developers to create a custom style for foreign phrases.

Semantic coding is essential for designers that work on multilingual websites.

As the World Wide Web Consortium explains, languages like Japanese don’t use italicization or bolding for emphasis — at least not the way English speakers do.

So, to properly translate a page from English, a Japanese designer would need to remove the italics or bolding and add surrounding brackets to the words. However, if everything is coded with and , or there’s a mix of  and  and and , it’s going to be really difficult to Find-and-Replace the correct HTML with ease.

So, if accessibility or internationalization are concerns for you at all, getting clear on the HTML you write with is going to be really important.

Wrap-Up

The fact of the matter is, it requires a lot of work to have the rules of HTML rewritten. So while it would be great to reset HTML, I don’t know that it’s all that practical.

All we can really do is stay abreast of what’s happening with the language, edit out legacy code from our websites the second it becomes deprecated, and always use tags and attributes that are supported. By playing around with deprecated or repurposed code, we only put the website visitors’ experience in jeopardy, so it’s best to take the time to clear out the old any chance we get.

If we can all get on the same page about this, problematic legacy HTML will eventually disappear from our websites and memories.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

The post Is It Time to Reset HTML? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

8 “Must-Have” Plugins to Speedify Your WordPress Site

June 2nd, 2021 No comments

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most valuable and beneficial content management platforms in existence.

Every second online business relies on WordPress to create and maintain successful websites. As per the research study by Kinsta, more than 40% of the websites on the internet are built using WordPress. 

However, despite all the effort businesses put into making an engaging and multifaceted WordPress website, some factors can still ruin the user experience. Characteristics such a loading speed, poor interface, lack of features, and many others can directly impact your brand image. We don’t want that to happen, and this is why we have come up with the best WordPress plugins to save your business websites. 

This article revolves around how WordPress website owners can leverage these speed optimization plugins to accelerate business sites. We will be talking about minifying plugins, compression plugins, caching plugins, image conversion plugins, and some additional plugins to let you make several changes. So make sure you stay till the end. 

Speed Enhancing WordPress Plugins

1. WPRocket:

WPRocket is the master king performance plugin to rule them all. You get all the caching functionality along with a bunch of special features. All of them wrapped up in the most simple yet mindful interface. Where in many caching plugins you are required to study the entire manual to understand the basic operations, WPRocket simplifies the setup process for you by comparison. 

The best part is, the plugin already comprises additional features so that you don’t have to install extra plugins. For Instance, there is database optimization, lazy image loading, and the integration of the Google analytic code on your own site. WP Rocket can also delay the Javascript execution time to save your page loading time. All in all, the plugin is worth exploring if you need something to optimize the speed of your website. 

Features of WPRocket:

  • Page Caching
  • CDN integration
  • Version rollback
  • Google Analytics integration to load code 
  • Cache preload
  • Delay JS execution
  • Minimal tweaking
  • Simple and user-friendly interface

2. NitroPack

NitroPack is not just a WordPress plugin but a complete optimization platform. The ultimate idea behind creating this plugin is to simplify the speed optimization process. How is that done? 

NitroPack speedifies everything automatically, so you do not have to sit and decide manually which plugin to use. All you need to do is add your business website and install the connector plugin. You also get the choice to moderate the level of optimization. The plugin implements compression, minification, global CDN, serving images, image optimization, and various caching types. Moreover, it also performs DNS prefetch and Javascript deferration on your WordPress site. 

All the changes made by NitroPack help improve the time to first byte (TTFB) and web core vitals. If you want more out of the plugin, you can also perform customization in the settings by choosing the “strong” mode. 

Features of NitroPack:

  • Automatic configured global CDN
  • DNS prefetching
  • HTML, CSS and JS minification
  • Website optimization
  • Image conversion to the next-gen format
  • Various caching types
  • Supports WordPress and other CMS
  • CSS, HTML and JS compression

3. WPFastest Cache

WPFastestCache, as the name suggests, focuses on caching. It offers a great set of balanced features that can be utterly useful to your WordPress site. This plugin works on a middle ground (neither too easy nor too tough) where you have to install, activate and customize your settings. 

Further, you save these settings, and you are good to go. The unique part is that you can easily cache expiration times for different URL strings. If you check this plugin on WordPress.org, you will see how more than a million users rely on it for caching. 

Features of WPFastest Cache 

  • Minifies CSS and HTML
  • CDN integration
  • Easy setup
  • Sets expiration times
  • One-click clear or minify cache
  • Premium version with additional features. 

4. Cache Enabler 

Cache Enabler is another fantastic plugin from KeyCDN to solve your caching issues. The plugin is known for its lightweight and easy-to-install properties. 

It serves you with the option to minify set up, confirm the cache expiry time, and many other features. Moreover, If you also want to add a content delivery network service to your website, you can utilize its sister plugin, CDN Enabler. Its sister plugin follows the same principle and features. 

Features of Cache Enabler:

  • Minification features
  • One-click clear cache
  • Confirm post IDs to exclude from cache
  • Expiration time setup
  • Customize cache behavior 

5. W3 Total Cache 

This super popular speed-enhancing plugin is well known in the web development industry. It serves its purpose by giving you a massive range of features and supportive caching methods. Not only this, but the W3 Total cache also provides advanced support for CDN and Cloudflare services. 

However, due to its massive set of features, it does not come with an easy setup. So, you can go for this plugin if you are an advanced user. Not to forget that this WordPress plugin also gets tricky during uninstalling. You need more science than just deactivating and deleting the plugin. Therefore, if you work with W3 Total cache, ensure to hire expert WordPress developers for technical insights. 

Features of W3 TOtal cache-

  • Database caching
  • Browser caching
  • CDN support 
  • Cloudflare support
  • Object caching 

6. WP Super Minify

The objective of minifying is to combine CSS, JS, and HTML in order to compress them and offer them to visitors. This, in a way, takes control of the website loading time. 

The important thing to remember here is to be careful while installing and optimizing this plugin, as in some cases, it can cause conflicts with other components. The good news is, WP Super Minify gives you the option to disable the CSS or JS compression if you are concerned about the conflicts. 

Features of WP Super Minify

  • Option to disable JS or CSS compression
  • Easy to use interface
  • Extremely straightforward
  • Minifies JS, CSS and HTML 

7. WP Smush.it 

WP Smush.it is entirely based on the Yahoo Smush.it service that is utilized in removing irrelevant bytes from the image files and optimizing them. WordPress users use many files with “lossy formats” and can degrade the image quality; on the other hand, WP Smush uses a lossless format, hence, no compromise with the quality. 

This plugin is managed by WPMU DEV and is worth trying if you have a WordPress site based on images. 

Features of WP Smush 

  • Optimizes in JPEG compression
  • Integration with Smush.it API
  • Strips metadata from JPEG.
  • Option to run the existing image through the plugin
  • Strips unused color from the image. 

8. LazyLoad by WP Rocket 

Generally, when a visitor hits your WordPress site and tries to load a page, the entire page appears on the screen. If it’s a long page with several images and videos, your loading time can extend up to seconds. 

The fact is, sometimes you don’t need an entire page to load at the same time, especially when there are high resolution graphics. Here comes the Lazyload by WPRocket to help you pack only the specific elements asked by the user. 

The exciting part is, this plugin allows you to replace your YouTube iFrames with the existing thumbnails. 

Features of Lazyload 

  • Replacement of post images and thumbnails. 
  • Replacement of YouTube iFrames
  • Ultra-lightweight since JS is not used 

Final Thoughts 

We understand the struggle to speed up a WordPress site. The plugins mentioned above can help you efficiently maintain your business site. You might not need all the popular WordPress plugins discussed here; however, it’s pretty standard for users to end up using at least six plugins. You can experiment with the tools and then decide which one suits your WordPress site better.

Featured Image by Fikret tozak on Unsplash

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Are Custom Properties a “Menu of What Will Change”?

June 2nd, 2021 No comments

PPK laid out an interesting situation in “Two options for using custom properties” where he and Stefan Judis had two different approaches for doing the same thing with custom properties. In one approach, hover and focus styles for a link are handled with two different custom properties, one for each state. In the other approach, a single custom property is used.

Two custom properties:

.component1 {
  --linkcolor: red;
  --hovercolor: blue;
}

.component2 {
  --linkcolor: purple;
  --hovercolor: cyan;
}

a {
  color: var(--linkcolor);
}

a:hover,a:focus {
  color: var(--hovercolor)
}

One custom property:

.component1 a {
  --componentcolor: red;
}

.component1 :is(a:hover,a:focus) {
  --componentcolor: blue;
}
	
.component2 a {
  --componentcolor: purple;
}

.component2 :is(a:hover,a:focus) {
  --componentcolor: cyan;
}
	
a {
  color: var(--componentcolor)		
}

There is something more natural feeling about using two properties, like it’s very explicit about what a particular custom property is meant to do. But there is a lot of elegance to using one custom property. Not just for the sake of being one-less custom property, but that the custom property is 1-to-1 matched with a single property.

Taking this a bit further, you could set up a single ruleset with one custom property per property, giving it a sort of menu for what things will change. To that PPK says:

Now you essentially found a definition file. Not only do you see the component’s default styles, you also see what might change and what will not.

That is to say, you’d use a custom property for anything you intend to change, and anything you don’t, you wouldn’t. That’s certainly an interesting approach that I wouldn’t blame anyone for trying.

.lil-grid {
  /* will change */
  --padding: 1rem;
  padding: var(--padding);
  --grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr;
  grid-columns: var(--grid-template-columns);

  /* won't change */
  border: 1px solid #ccc;
  gap: 1rem;
}

My hesitation with this is that it’s, at best, a hint at what will and won’t change. For example, I can still change things even though they aren’t set in a custom property. Later, I could do:

.lil-grid.two-up {
  grid-columns: 1fr 1fr;
}

That wipes out the custom property usage. Similarly, I could never change the value of --grid-template-columns, meaning it looks like it changes under different circumstances, but never does.

Likewise, I could do:

.lil-grid.thick {
  border-width: 3px;
}

…and even though my original component ruleset implies that the border width doesn’t change, it does with a modifier class.

So, in order to make an approach like that work, you treat it like a convention that you stick to, like a generic coding standard. I’d worry it becomes a pain in the butt, though. For any declaration you decide to change, you gotta go back and refactor it to either be or not be a custom property.

This makes me think about the “implicit styling API” that is HTML and CSS. We’ve already got a styling API in browsers. HTML is turned into the DOM in the browser, and we style the DOM with CSS. Select things, style them.

Maybe we don’t need a menu for what you can and cannot style because that’s what the DOM and CSS already are. That’s not to say a well-crafted set of custom properties can’t be a part of that, but they don’t need to represent hardline rules on what changes and what doesn’t.

Speaking of implicit styling APIs, Jim Nielsen writes in “Shadow DOM and Its Effect on the Unofficial Styling API”:

[…] the shadow DOM breaks the self-documenting style API we’ve had on the web for years.

What style API? If you want to style an element on screen, you open the dev tools, look at the DOM, find the element you want, figure out the right selector to target that element, write your selector and styles, and you’re done.

That’s pretty remarkable when you stop and think about it.

I suppose that’s my biggest beef with web components. I don’t dislike the Shadow DOM; in fact, it’s probably my favorite aspect of web components. I just dislike how I have to invent a styling API for them (à la custom properties that wiggle inside, or ::part) rather than use the styling API that has served us well forever: DOM + CSS.

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