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Lighthouse: Rapidfire Updates

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This year brought one major update and one minor update for my Lighthouse WordPress plugin. The entire codebase has been updated (and, in some places, refactored) to adhere to the WordPress Coding Standards. This helped me identify several back-end slowness issues and improving the overall speed of page execution.

Changelog

= 3.7.1 =
* FIX: Fixed 2 typos
* UPDATE: Exposed current database version on the plugin Dashboard
* UPDATE: Removed 8 database queries on plugin installation
* UPDATE: Added PHP requirements (7+)
* UPDATE: Removed CPU and memory check as not many hosts allow running the calls
* UPDATE: Improved back-end performance by removing several OS/server calls

= 3.7.0 =
* FEATURE: Implemented code cleanup on demand
* FEATURE: Implemented optimization presets
* UPDATE: Updated code according to WordPress Coding Standards
* UPDATE: Removed unused file and cleaned up old code
* UPDATE: Removed unused variables and improved audit performance
* UPDATE: Removed emoji from option name
* UPDATE: Removed Security tab and moved options to the Performance tab
* UPDATE: Removed CMS tab and moved options to the Setup tab
* UPDATE: Updated Frequently Asked Questions section

Changelog Breakdown

Lighthouse 3.7 cleans up a lot of old code and unused variables (in most cases left-overs from the SpeedFactor migration). One file has been deleted and several Unicode icons have been removed from the code.

The Security tab has been removed, and the HSTS and REST API options have been removed.

HSTS should be done at server level (.htaccess or Niginx config file or Cloudflare) and the REST API should never be disabled as the block editor is using it. The XML-RPC option has been moved to the Performance tab.

The CMS tab has been also removed and some of the options have moved to the Setup tab (which now features a cleanup button). Pretty neat!

Another big change is the addition of 2 optimization presets for new users: Basic/Safe and Advanced. Feel free to use any of them as starting points in your optimization efforts :)

Overall, the performance improved greatly in the back-end and slightly on the front-end, thanks to a few minification updates.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Q: How do I get automatic updates?
  • A: Lighthouse is built using Git Updater integration and it offers lifetime updates.
  • Q: Is Lighthouse compatible with other performance/caching/minification plugins?
  • A: Yes. Just make sure you don’t enable the same functionality on multiple plugins (e.g. minification, caching, feature removal).
  • Q: Will Lighthouse improve the speed of my WordPress back-end?
  • A: No. The WordPress back-end performance is influenced by many other factors, such as theme options and active plugins.

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