A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to present to the development team at my job to talk about addressing render-blocking issues that affected our client sites. I found the presentation to be a real standout during my time there and wanted to be able to share this with a wider audience.
The presentation explains why we need to fix certain SEO issues, how a browser displays a page, and some WordPress solutions implemented. Since the majority of the websites we had worked on were built using WordPress, the solutions presented are specifically tailored to WordPress sites. To understand what is render-blocking, I go over the basics of how browsers work and how it connects to the tests we can run which is also true for sites not running WordPress.
This was during a time when I was going through development performance audits of sites and dived into performance and learning a portion of Technical SEO. I learned a lot not just about SEO but about where that line between a seasoned Technical SEO expert and a development team. This was just one of the ways to try and bridge that gap in knowledge to make fixes more efficient.
This only scratches the surface, especially with the official rollout of INP in Core Web Vitals. Let me know what parts were helpful! Was there something missing? Let me know that too! I’d like to make this into a series diving into general web performance.