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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
It's issue number 100 of the newsletter!
Maria has returned with an excellent new post on our CommerceGurus blog about LCP.
Largest contentful paint or LCP is one of the Core Web Vital metrics that measure how long it takes for the largest content element to display on your screen.
With recent updates, LCP is also included in Google’s Page Experience update which makes it even more important if you want to improve your website’s ranking and enhance the user experience on your website.
Learn about how to optimize LCP on your store
Colm came across a very interesting post from developer Devin Price on how to manage fraud orders in WooCommerce.
One day he woke up to find 20,000 new fraudulent orders on a WooCommerce site he managed. The vast majority of them were in failed status, but a few had successfully completed.
He goes through the process of preventing a future attack and suggests implementing the following steps.
- Use a captcha on the checkout page
- Implement Cloudflare's firewall ($20 a month)
- Add Cloudflare's rate limiting
This is a very interesting post and is a handy guide to prevent such attacks happening on your own store.
Read about how to manage fraud orders in WooCommerce
Since the image lazy-loading feature was originally added to WordPress core in 5.5, by default every post content image is lazy-loaded.
This is a terrific improvement which leads to faster loading web pages and improved web vitals scores.
However, it was recently discovered that the current WordPress core implementation of lazy-loading has room for improvement as it can regress the Largest Contentful Paint metric (LCP) when hero images above the fold are being lazy-loaded.
Because of this, developer Felix Arntz has suggested the following tweak to the lazy loading implementation:
The first “x” content image(s) should not be lazy-loaded by default, with “x” being as high as possible so that there is little to no LCP regression and as low as possible so that there is little to no regression in the total bytes loaded.
Hopefully we'll see this included in version 5.9 and see a improved LCP metrics as a result.
You can follow the trac ticket here.
Read about improving native WordPress lazy-loading
I thought this was a fascinating article about filtering on the web from Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief at Smashing Magazine.
Filters are everywhere. While we often think of them appearing when booking flights or shopping online, filters are frequently used in pretty much every interface that features more than a handful of data points.
He looks at lots of different filtering implementations, including eCommerce examples which are done well and badly.
I've written about adding product filters to WooCommerce previously, if you missed the post be sure and check it out too.
Discover more about frustrating filtering design patterns
Sarah Gooding has written about a new service for disposable WordPress sites called InstaWP.
Founder Vikas Singhal created the tool to provide a quick way to set up live testing sites online or to show something to a client or team. At setup, users can select from WordPress versions back to 4.7 and may even choose to spin up a site using the latest beta or release candidate.
Free WordPress instances stay live for 8 hours, and users can link their accounts via email to extend it to 48 hours.
This is useful for multiple reasons including:
- Testing a feature of WordPress
- Testing a plugin/theme
- Testing different versions of WP/PHP
- Creating an ‘instant’ test environment for clients to test plugins/themes
Read more about InstaWP over on WP Tavern
Latest Shoptimizer updates
If you've been using our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme, we pushed a couple of nice updates this week in version 2.4.4, both for the theme and our CommerceKit plugin.
See everything on the theme's changelog page.
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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