Hey everyone,
I hope you’ve had a good month. I took some time off, but coming back soon with videos about loading speed and SEO.
Here are a few updates from April:
📹 Beginners Guide to Chrome Inspector
This didn’t get a lot of views but it’s one of the most important videos I’ve made.
Knowing how to use the chrome inspector is a major life-hack for anyone who owns/runs a website of any kind.
It’s a tool that developers use literally every time they make visual changes to a website.
Tabs Section update!
I first built this section a few months ago, but recently updated it based on the feedback of several stores.
It’s a lot more flexible now with more settings and much better on mobile.
Freelance Designer 101 by kristi.digital
My partner Kristina is a freelance designer. She designs my Youtube thumbnails, my website, Gumroad assets and more.
If you’re interested in working as a freelance web designer, I highly recommend the set of articles she wrote about the process of working with clients, called “Freelance Designer 101”.
- Part 1 - First contact with a client
- Part 2 - Pricing Strategies
- Part 3 - Initial Quote & Proposal
There is also a Notion kit that will help you get started with proposal templates and invoicing:
Beware of magic speed optimization apps!
The Shopify performance team recently published an article warning of “fake performance apps”.
These apps essentially just fool the various speed testing tools so that you get a higher pagespeed score. This totally misses the point. We want our websites to be faster, not just look faster to pass all the tests.
The article explains how to check if you’re using one of these scam apps, but I’ll add that you can usually tell by the fact that they don’t say how exactly they would increase the speed of your store.
Some legitimate ways to speed up a store are:
- Optimizing images
- Deferring javascript
- Asset preloading
- Lazy loading
If your app does these things then it’s probably genuine. What’s not ok is apps that claim to increase your speed through vague marketing terms like “boosting”, “accelerating”, etc… without further explanation.
In other words, there is no such thing as magically speeding up a store, so be wary of apps that claim it.
What’s going on with Shopify’s updates?
We are still waiting for most of the features announced in Editions ‘24, although many of you should now have the new Web Performance Dashboard.
Color swatches on the product page are not ready yet. Dawn v13 supports them. However, the admin side has not been rolled out yet. For that, we need the new ‘category metafields’ feature. I featured this in my Shopify Editions video.
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Cheers,
Ed