The spambots are a pain for sure and I remember spending many frustrated hours with mixed results trying various things to stop them. CloudFlare does seem to stop most if not all spambots but the clever thing is how it learns as it goes along, so if one site experiences problems the information is quickly passed along the CloudFlare network. Having checked the security logs in CloudFlare it does show Semalt etc being blocked on a regular basis without needing to do anything at my end.
I wouldn’t say my experiences with CloudFlare have been 100% perfect and I have seen some problems but these seemed to stem from conflicts with my own VPS server that was already customised for speed, so I tend to think now that CloudFlare works best when your own server install is very basic. After some initial teething problems it has worked with remarkable reliability and most people would not face the issues I saw.
[quote=“willwood, post:10, topic:4554, full:true”]
Google PageSpeed Insights really isn’t the best tool for the job. As I’ve said before, if you’re using PageSpeed Insights for testing a RapidWeaver website, then you’re doing it all wrong! If you read the documentation you’ll see it’s geared more towards enterprise level websites receiving millions of visits a day.[/quote]
Well, I went to PageSpeed as a recommendation from the makers of Rapidweaver in one of their Blog post, so someone at Realmac thinks it’s worth checking
I have the same problem. From what I understand it’s a javascript call that is at the top of the page instead of the bottom as it should be. Any way we can fix this (or the stack makers can fix this)?
you can’t fix this - it’s down to the Theme / Stacks developer and not something you can control. But, as elsewhere on this page, it’s not a major issue. I have sites that meet the required speed tests but still have the ‘above the fold’ error. And here’s another thumbs up for Cloudflare
I do SEO for clients almost every day in different publishing platforms and PageSpeed Insights is not the best tool to use for smaller / static websites. YSlow or one of the others is far better for the sorts of websites 99% of RapidWeaver users are publishing. So I would argue that Realmac article is wrong and stand by what I say, based on my own experiences of helping actual individuals and businesses gain better SEO.
I give all my RapidWeaver theme customers a free SEO guide to use, and YSlow is referenced in that too. People have told me how helpful my guide is, compared with some of the others out there and have told me they’re seeing a real improvement in SEO after implementing my recommendations.
Moving all CSS and JS calls to the bottom of the page simply is not feasible in RapidWeaver. And if you’ve ever tried it before, you will quickly notice the page looks terrible as it renders - bits of plain text content strewn all over the place and then the page jumps and moves around as the CSS and JS loads. If you are building the next Wikipedia or Facebook then of course moving files around (with such precision) could be paramount if you’ve got trillions of page views. But for the rest of us, it does not matter. Ironically if you go to Google’s homepage and view the source code, you’ll find it’s stuffed-full with render blocking scrips and CSS code!
Thanks for the reply Will. I know nothing about SEO, it’s the reason I was going through that blog post, so I’ll take your word for it and try YSlow instead of PageSpeed. So much to learn!
