A common piece of advice when it comes to optimizing the browser performance of your website is to concatenate and minify your CSS and JavaScript. There are many reasons and place you’ll see this recommended but Google PageSpeed Insights was the one that spurred me to action. And for me, I settled on a WordPress plugin called “Autoptimize” to make it easier for me to do it on this site. Autoptimize, if it’s not obvious, is a combination of the words “automatic” and “optimize”, and that’s just what it is, easy optimization of thing that are hard for non-developers to do.

Enqueuing is the WordPress way to add a stylesheet or JavaScript file on a page. We already published a Quick Guide about including your JavaScript in WordPress. This time, though, we’re adding an extra wrinkle: how do you only enqueue a JavaScript file on certain pages of your WordPress site. That’s the focus of this here Quick Guide.

If, like me, you’ve known about CSS flexbox for a long time but don’t really know it, I have something that might help. It’s not the solution — I just finished it and I don’t feel like a flexbox-master — but it is REALLY REALLY good as a learning tool. I now would consider reaching for flexbox when before I wouldn’t have thought to.

I recently needed to create a number of masonry layouts for a WooCommerce website I’m building for a friend. I didn’t want to resort to jQuery, and that’s how, at long last, I found CSS3’s columns property. It lets you do CSS-only layouts that look like this:

In the first of a few “Whaaaat I had no idea CSS3 did that” posts from me: You can set elements to be a percentage of the height of your browser window!

WordPress 4.7, which launched on December 6, 2106, makes customizing the CSS on your site a whole lot easier. Easier enough that I think it’s worth an explanation. So that’s the topic of this Quick Guide. If you want to know even more about the cool new developer-relevant features of 4.7, check out Fred’s post from Tuesday.

Three major changes in WordPress 4.7 jump out as having the power to significantly transform how I do my work every day.

I’m building a client site, and I wanted to write a couple of CSS rules:

If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on WordPress 4.7, you can now get the Beta 1 version from wordpress.org. The feature list is looking really spicy. Standouts include: