This plugin is a companion to the Nightingale Theme. It is aimed at improving performance and user experience on a site that uses the Nightingale theme. The plugin adds additional functionality to the theme
The following features are included within Nightingale Companion:
- Retina Images – this enables your site to serve double quality images for retina display devices, and makes multiple sizes for each of the sizes configured on your site. This all happens automatically in the background and will improve the look of your thumbnails, images and banners across your site for retina capable screens.
- Disable Emojis – this disables the default emoji packages that ship with WordPress, which load on every single page of your site and impact performance and speed. This is a tiny tweak that has an incremental benefit.
- LoadCSS – this uses the loadcss javascript library (https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS) which defers loading of your stylesheets to after the main html has loaded. This increases the speed of time to interaction for your pages
- InstantPage – this uses the instantpage javascript library (https://github.com/instantpage/instant.page) to trigger pages preloading when a user hovers their mouse over links. This does not, in fact increase load times but does appear perception of load times as those few partial seconds pre click are actually being used to start loading the next page.
- DeferJS – adds a defer tag to all javascript (excluding jQuery and loadcss) to defer loading of js resources until after HTML has loaded in.
- Set Browser Cache – this is a setting to tell users’ browser to cache locally the content. The value is number of seconds that this local cache should be stored, defaulting to 43200 (12 hours)
- Enable LazyLoading – adds a tag to all media resources to use native lazyloading. This will work on all modern browsers (except FireFox)
- Cleanup WordPress meta tags – removes lots of WP native tags included in the header region.
- Compress HTML output – very basic minification of output HTML. This does not combine or minify included files. Will reduce size of output HTML by around 3-5%
- Use Excerpts as Meta Description – WordPress automatically takes the first 55 words of a post or page to create an excerpt (or you can manually add your own per page/post). This modification uses this excerpt to populate the meta escription tag. If you have an alternative method of generating this meta tag, you should disable this option.
- Modified the login page to use the theme design and layout (this option is not switchable at present)
- Adds the emergency alert header to the theme customiser (this option is not switchable at present)