I had a client who had users report an issue with the website on iPhone and Macbooks – apparently the screen was just flashing and nothing was working. Ok I quickly jumped on an iPhone (7) and had a look, all pages worked fine. The issue must be on their end I thought.
Then I asked them for what particular model they were using, to which they replied iPhone 6. I had a quick look using browserstack at the homepage and it was fine. The client uses woocommerce so I jumped on one of the archive pages, it rendered fine, but then it kept reloading continously. I then tried a MacBook simulation with an older version of safari – the page kept refreshing every second flashing like a strobe light!
So then I went back through my list of recent changes. One thing that I added to the archive pages was lazy loading, ok i'll try updating that script (no luck), then turn off the lazy loading alltogether (still no luck).
Then I thought it was a css issues. I noticed in the console a few warnings, so I fixed them – still no luck.
Then I thought it was canonical SEO settings that were causing the page to continuously reload. Nope.
Then, I disabled all plugins (by moving them all into a folder), the page doesnt refresh anymore, phewww…
The burning question: which plugins can I live without?
I started slowly moving the plugins from my folder back into the main folder (effectively reactivating them), I started with the ones that the client couldn't live without (or would certainly make life harder not having them active) – Woocommerce, Backups, Pagebuilder etc
The list narrows
I was finally left with just 1 plugin: Yith Woocommerce Ajax Product Filter. Now I will add that this particular plugin had not been updated (licence expired) – so im pretty sure the issue would be fixed on newer versions. For now we will leave the plugin disabled.
This was one of those funny issues that only affected a particular browser/operating system and certainly shows how important a testing suite (in my case browserstack) can be.
First try of Gutenberg – my impressions
This post was kind of an excuse to have a go at Gutenberg and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Its super fast and definitely a step in the right direction.
As somebody who REALLY struggles to write, I found that Gutenberg made it a little easier. One cool feature that is missing (and I rely heavily on) for now the ability to paste as text – hopefully this will be added in future releases. I think that my clients who really do a lot of blogging will be stoked on Gutenberg.
