Yesterday and today I worked very hard on making my blog faster. In the Google Search Console I saw that my blog suddenly gets half as many clicks since a few days and that my pages are only “moderately” fast. I don’t really care about the number of clicks, but I do want the site to be fast. PageSpeed Insights also showed me that the time until the “First Contentful Paint” seems to be longer than a second for many users (and it has to be under a second for it to be considered fast).

I have taken the following measures:

• Optimized HTML and CSS
• Embedded CSS in HTML to reduce the critical path and the number of requests
• Reduced the CNAME chain
• Enabled the BunnyCDN Origin Shield (this probably has the greatest effect - especially for requests from the other side of the world)

With Fast or Slow my blog now reaches 100% in every category. Hopefully Google will soon notice that the site is now much faster.

Inspired by the posts of Kev Quirk and Jake Bauer, I did a Lighthouse test of my website. I wanted to see how good my blog is SEO wise. Some shortcomings were pointed out to me, for example I forgot to add rel="noopener" to external links with target="_blank" and in the mobile view some “tap targets” were too close together, so you could have clicked on the wrong one. I have addressed the problems and improved a few things in my theme. I don’t care that much about SEO, but somehow it’s nicer when Lighthouse confirms that you follow all the best practices, it’s the ambition. There are still a few things I could improve on, but I think then there is never an end.

To do a Lighthouse test, you can either use the “Audits” tab in Chromium-based browsers, or this bookmarklet in Firefox:

javascript:void(document.location='https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl='+escape(document.location)+'&strategy=mobile&category=performance&category=accessibility&category=best-practices&category=seo')

I finally took the time to fix the reading feature on my blog (the “Read to me, please!” button below the title). Initially, I used the property textContent to get the text content from the DOM element, but I figured out that it’s better to use innerText for this purpose. Read this article on the differences.

I also made the script to not block the rendering anymore by removing it from the critical request chain.

It was a very spontaneous decision, but it is now possible to follow my blog via Telegram: https://jlel.se/tgblog

Just a small note: I deleted my Microblog.pub instance. I liked this piece of software and it’s a nice single-user alternative to Mastodon, but I don’t need a Fediverse instance anymore. My new fediverse strategy is to use my normal blog to post stuff (you can follow me via @en@jlelse.blog and @de@jlelse.blog) and Miniflux to follow people (Mastodon offers RSS user feeds).

If you reply to posts or mention my user handle in a public post on Mastodon, I will receive a notification and your reply will appear in the “Interaction” section under the post. If you interact with a post on your website and don’t automatically send Webmentions, you can also submit the URL in the form below each post.

By removing Microblog.pub from my server it also reduces the need for resources a lot. Python as well as MongoDB don’t seem to be that resource friendly. I currently use the cheapest VPS option from Hetzner and for the few remaining things hosted there (my website, my blog and some Go tools etc.), it’s more than enough.

I recently tried to improve a few parts of my blog and its theme:

1. Links in the content are now underlined, to better differentiate between links and bold text.
2. You can see the section of the entry below the title.
3. Point 2 also let me reduce the number of linked sections in the main menu.
4. I added the option to create anonymous comments without an own website by using comment parade.

If you find more things, which I should improve, feel free to contact me.