Weekly Links Roundup – Lazy Loading, GDPR, CDN Comparison, Trackbacks

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

I know it’s been a few weeks, but June is busy – a weekend trip, Comic Con, a new kitten… But today I’m getting caught up.

If you’re worried about long load times for your website (and you should be) one of the optimizations you can try is ‘lazy loading.’ Lazy loading is when you delay loading of below-the-fold content until the user actually scrolls down to where they are on the page. This way, things that aren’t needed immediately, like images and video, don’t slow down the initial page load. Here’s a nice review post about lazy loading that highlights some of the main WordPress lazy loading plugins. Personally I like a3 Lazy Load and just used it in a site this morning…

You probably haven’t been hearing as much about GDPR since it went into effect May 25th – but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Here’s a post-launch article about GDPR and why it’s still such a confusing mess.

If you’re thinking about adding a CDN (content delivery network) to your site, for the benefits of serving static content from servers physically closer to your visitors and making your site faster, here’s a comparison of CloudFlare and MaxCDN. CloudFlare has a free option and MaxCDN does not, but they are both good choices. This post will explain why.

Finally… all about WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks – what they are, why you may or may not want them, and what to do about them.