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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
Follow up: respectfully, I also question the value of having a forum widget on the .com landing page. Since .com is currently “this is Textpattern, and it’s light, and amazing, and here are some things you could do”…then there’s this callout to very specific forum topics that probably have zero or no relevance to a newbie to Textpattern. Maybe I’m being myopic. Can someone explain the value to me, please? Thank you.
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
gaekwad wrote #328612:
Can someone explain the value to me, please? Thank you.
It’s a holdover from the older Textpattern.com site. I assume it’s:
1. To keep the homepage looking constantly updated (for SEO, although a bit underhand IMO).
2. Somewhere to add in some paid links (which I assume Robert still handles).
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
philwareham wrote #328613:
It’s a holdover from the older Textpattern.com site. I assume it’s:
1. […] (for SEO, although a bit underhand IMO).
Agreed. We’ll have to write more articles!
2. Somewhere to add in some paid links (which I assume Robert still handles).
The ad stuff I can live with (just about), people can tune that out (or even use an adblocker), it just seems a bit strange to have a forum laundry list when the intended audience could probably do with a simple link…perhaps to a “here’s how the forum works” or an introductory forum for them to say hi, work on the new user onramp stuff instead. Also – someone has to say it – it’s a bit disingenuous to have ads under the “from the forum” header, that’s just weird.
Last edited by gaekwad (2021-02-08 11:07:18)
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
The bottleneck is ads_webinformer form.
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
etc wrote #328601:
Caching latest forum news saves ~100ms, but the performance score is still under 90.
Just so I understand this: As I have the etc_cache plugin installed on the site, can I simply put that forum code within <txp:etc_cache id="forum-api" time="-900"> tags and then that is cached on the server for 15 minutes for all subsequent visitors (and then fetched again for 15 minutes upon first visitor to site after that) – i.e. the server won’t make an API request during that duration? I am a little unsure if I interpreted this plugin’s use correctly?
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
philwareham wrote #328617:
the server won’t make an API request during that duration?
That’s right (and actually already done), it will pull the content from etc_cache table instead. But the main guilty is here. And since the request seems to be delayed, caching it is problematic.
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
We tweaked the forum widget cache-iness when spam was more prevalent than now, so deleted junk threads wouldn’t appear on the .com front page.
Edit: I’ll check to be sure, but the fluxBB caching side of things for the widget should be 0, so .com-side can do the magic.
Last edited by gaekwad (2021-02-08 11:41:11)
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
etc wrote #328618:
That’s right, it will pull the content from
etc_cachetable instead. But the main guilty is here. And since the request seems to be delayed, caching it is problematic.
Thanks. I have just cached the forum API and also the blog listing on our homepage which have combined saved some milliseconds. You are correct though, the web informer ad is the main cause of the delay in server response (about 300-400ms saved if I omit that from the page).
However, I don’t think I will be able to cache this item anyway as I’m not sure what agreements they have with Robert – whether they track hits to that external HTML as a metric in how well their ad is performing or if it’s simply a way of getting backlink juice for their domain. I’ve been told off before for messing with that so I’m reluctant to make any further changes.
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
It’s annoying though – I’m getting a consistent page load of around 180ms on Pingdom Tools for the Textpattern homepage without that ad, and 560ms with the ad.
Upshot of all this though, is that Textpattern is super-quick when everything is optimised as well as I can currently do. And that’s without a Varnish, or similar, cache on top (as far as I’m aware).
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
At least we know it’s not Textpattern.
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
etc wrote #328623:
At least we know it’s not Textpattern.
I wonder if there is a way, with PHP, to request that web informer HTML asynchronously at the start of our code execution (say, above the <html> tag in a page template) and then when it gets to the point in the template where it needs to insert it, it’s had a headstart on fetching the item (kind of like we are doing with defer on JavaScript). That could shave some time off. Is that possible with PHP?
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Re: Core Web Vitals to affect Google rankings May 2021
philwareham wrote #328624:
request that web informer HTML asynchronously at the start of our code execution (say, above the <html> tag in a page template) and then when it gets to the point in the template where it needs to insert it, it’s had a headstart on fetching the item
I don’t think the difference would be noticeable. Leave it with Robert :-)
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