It’s been a hectic month here at Rainmaker HQ.
We have a lot of irons in the fire right now for Rainmaker Digital Services and Rainmaker Platform. Stay tuned for new features and new content updates to our cornerstones as we work to improve our offerings for both old and new clients.
In the meantime, I’ve been surprised how many clients don’t realize that we’re a digital agency as well as a platform provider. Reach out to us with any creative, marketing or development projects you might have. In fact, we’re running a promotion right now for a FREE half-hour consultation to help you figure out how to do your next services project … and we’ll knock 10% off if you decide to create it with us. Don’t miss out.
Rainmaker Platform Updates 3.5.0.1, 3.5.0.2 and 3.5.0.3
We’ve released three revisions since our last State of the Platform. These updates primarily focus on bug fixes and quality of life enhancements. We also addressed a few conflicts that cropped up with our new site speed features that were added in version 3.5.
The biggest change of this month was an update to the integration with Keap (Infusionsoft). If you’re using this integration, you should have already received an email from us detailing how to update your site; if not, please let us know.
For more information on the latest updates to Rainmaker Platform, see the changelog.
Speed Up Your Site
In the last State of the Platform, we touched on some new site speed features that came with 3.5: Debloat and WP Super Cache. These features were very new at the time, but clients have had a little time to use them now. They have proven to be very effective, as they were in internal testing, with between 30-40% speed improvements on some pages. Every site and every page is different, but we know these two Add-Ons work — and work well.
These should be on by default. To check (and turn them on if they aren’t), go to the Settings gear menu > Features.
From here, choose the Add-Ons tab.
Click the check boxes next to Debloat and WP Super Cache to enable these Add-Ons (they should be on already).
Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save (not pictured).
Congratulations, these features are enabled.
For most people, this is all you’ll need to do. However, if you have Autoptimize enabled and configured to manage JavaScript and CSS, you’ll need to go through a couple more steps to get the most out of these new tools. Autoptimize and these plugins do some of the same things, so you’ll need to disable the JS and CSS functions of Autoptimize.
Go to the Settings gear menu > Autoptimize.
Then uncheck the boxes for Optimize Javascript Code? and Optimize CSS Code?
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save (not pictured).
What does Debloat do?
A web page in its simplest form is just text, images and video served to a browser. Basic HTML code supports some limited display options like centering text or adding basic colors, but early web pages didn’t have a lot of options for display.
Today, many web pages use CSS, JavaScript and other markup languages for advanced display options including gradients, sliders, tables, and more to enhance the user experience. Much of the content is still the same, but it’s a lot easier to make your page look the way you want.
The flip side is that there’s more code to load to create that layout.
By default, a lot of that code is applied to every page. But it doesn’t always need it.
Debloat removes code that isn’t needed on some of the individual pages of your site, speeding up the load times for those pages. Instead of checking for and running a bunch of instructions when the page loads, your site can now skip those steps.
How does WP Super Cache affect speed?
When you go to a website, your browser has to download everything to display that page, and it has to run every instruction from scratch.
Caching creates a copy of some resources and stores those on the server to simplify the processing required by the user’s browser when they return. WP Super Cache goes a step further: it preloads a copy of all the code and everything that would normally run when you load a web page for the first time, making a static page that can be loaded onto the local machine upon request.
Think of it like making a meal from scratch versus using a meal prep service — the ingredients are the same, but one is way faster and more convenient.
WP Super Cache doesn’t work for every user (if they need individual elements like a logged-in user’s individual control panel or access options, it won’t work), but for 99% of your visitors, will help a ton.
Use Rainmaker Platform’s New Site Speed Plugins
Together, Debloat and WP Super Cache make your site more efficient, speed up your audience accessing your site and help your site work quicker.
With Rainmaker Platform, we’ve made sure these options “play nice” together so you don’t get anything stripped that’s actually important (display CSS for pages, for example). That being said, if you see anything that doesn’t appear to be working right, drop us a line. There are some advanced settings on the back end which we can adjust if your site needs them.
We’re very excited about these new Add-Ons. We want to see how they look in the wild, but early returns have been promising. Your site should run faster and more efficiently than ever with RMP and these new tools. Don’t miss out. Enable Debloat and WP Super Cache on your site and reap the benefits.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services