Here at Web Design GM we are always striving to create beautiful semantic websites which are cross browser compatible. What is cross browser compatibility? For the people who don’t know – all websites need to use a piece of software called a browser to display it on your computer, laptop or mobile device such as an iPhone or an iPad. Various people may have different versions of browser software because for one reason or another they have not updated it or use a different company to display internet pages.

When we design and developed websites we always make sure we test our pages against various browser platforms so that it renders correctly on the audiences computers correctly. This is crucial as we want our customers website’s audience to stay on the website and eventually send enquiries or call them and attract more business.

We have stumbled upon a website where we can test with all versions of browsers such as I.E 6, Safari 3, Firefox 2, Chrome 11 etc. We usually used Adobe Browser Labs to test our websites but it was hard to debug jQuery compatibility issue with this as it did not support it. Please go to Spoon.net and test to see if your website is cross browser compatible today.

Does your WordPress blogs load slow? Google are taking page load speeds a bit more seriously nowadays hence it is crucial that your websites build considers the page load time. As web designers we can certainly help web developers by not designing websites with big backgrounds etc. Over 80% of the end user response time is from the front end. Images, Flash, jQuery, Javascript, CSS all play a part in how quick your WordPress or web page loads.

There are a few things that you can implement to speed up your WordPress or web page:

1. Install less WordPress plugins, do not overload it. A good plugin to have is WP Super Cache and you can download it from here. Also delete inactive plugins from the server and this would get rid of external stylesheets or javascript files that the plugin may call on a particular page.

2. Combine all the CSS together in one file and keep in header and try combing javascript together or minify using a online javascript packer which can be found here and place in the footer.

3. Use a light weight theme and makes sure you use CSS sprites and not big background images etc. If you do use lots of images you can use a WordPress plugin which will reduce the file size of a image without affect the quality of the image. This plugin can be found here.

4. Try using free content delivery networks such as Cloudflare it is quick and easy to setup and will protect your website from Malware and other nasty attacks.

5. Add the below code to your theme’s functions.php place it at the top to remove unwanted stuff from your header file.

remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘feed_links_extra’, 3 ); 
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘feed_links’, 2 );
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’); 
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’); 
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘index_rel_link’);
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘parent_post_rel_link_wp_head’, 10, 0); 
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head’, 10, 0); 
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp_shortlink_wp_head’, 10, 0 );
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘start_post_rel_link’);

If you want a web design / website design team to help you with your wordpress website then please contact us on Bristol: 01179 000 482 or Cardiff: 02920 290 080 today.

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