After two changes of operating systems involving two reinstalls and a change in hosting provider, I’ve decided the point has come where I need to give less attention to around with the server and start posting again. Along the way I went down the rabbit hole and explored Google PageSpeed Insights, where improving the score is possibly the darkest art I’ve come across across since I started setting up websites. Change one thing to try to improve the score and instead it makes it worse – reverse the change and the worse score remains. Flush all the caches. It still stays at the lower score.

And don’t get me started on “Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content”, which seems to be baked into the core of WordPress – only way of stopping so far has involved accepting a Flash of (or even permanent) Unstyled Content, which in 2016 I’m not prepared to do. So I’ve taken things as far as I can for the moment and the only negative at the moment is that my Gravatar doesn’t appear properly on posts. Any more substantial PageSpeed improvements would involve a fundamental redesign of the site and to do that I think it would be better to stop changing the existing site and instead set up a test one and gradually build it back up from scratch. I know that’s really just good practice but this experience has reminded me that what starts out as a bit of apparently harmless tweaking can open up a world of pain on a live site.

The day job also hasn’t helped but without that I doubt I would be posting in the first place. Now I have a serious backlog on reviews and limited time, so no more wittering on a bout the server. A links posts will follow this one – it will be obvious that I’ve not been reading much in the last 3 months either!

The new web server configuration is painfully slow. I feel a reinstall coming on. More to follow.