February 21, 2018 — In trying to figure out how to build better WordPress sites faster, we at Cornershop have developed an approach that leverages WP-CLI to dynamically inject configurable, pre-written code (HTML, PHP, JS and SASS) into our in-house starter theme. This novel approach speeds up our custom development work by letting us quickly assemble oft-used functionality without littering our theme with superfluous code.

Come learn about the decision-making that led us to go down this road, and see exactly how we’ve gone about building our extensible framework as a plugin that extends WP-CLI. Whether you’re an agency or a solo freelancer, hopefully seeing our approach can lead to fruitful thinking on how you can deliver the most value to your clients.

August 12, 2014 — Data from major Internet providers like Google, Amazon and Akamai has shown that how fast a website loads significantly affects user behavior. And because users don’t like slow sites, Google uses load time as a factor in computing PageRank results. In short: It pays to be fast.

There are a lot of factors that can affect your site’s performance. While some are dependent on your hosting environment, there are plenty of factors beyond server/internet speed (and the obvious sheer number of bits to be loaded) that affect your page load time, such as HTTP connections, DNS lookups, and asset load sequencing.

If you’re a front-end developer and you’re serious about building websites that load as fast as possible, come learn about techniques (such as non-blocking Javascript) you can use in your markup and themes — whether on WordPress or some other system — to help things load as quickly as possible. We’ll also review tools you can use to assess whether your site is doing all it can to load quickly.

October 31, 2011