Cutting CLS from 0.559 to 0.014, measured
I built the same page two ways and measured both. Reserved image boxes and pre-placed slots dropped Cumulative Layout Shift from 0.559 (POOR) to 0.014 (GOOD).
archive
Columns · Page 5
356 · Page 5
A 117KB hero with a 1.2s LCP: the browser found it too late
Slow LCP is rarely about image weight — it is about when the browser finds it. I traced a CSS hero invisible to the preload scanner and cut LCP 1247ms to 109ms.
Catch Broken JSON-LD in CI Before It Ships
A JSON-LD parser passes markup no search engine can read: schema.org sets @vocab, so typos and wrong casing expand into valid JSON-LD. A 60-line schema-aware validator catches them in CI, with real logs.
What axe-core Misses After Reporting Zero Violations
I seeded eight WCAG barriers into a checkout page and ran axe-core. It caught the four rule-based ones and missed the four needing human judgment entirely.
JSON-LD vs Microdata vs RDFa: Which Structured Data Syntax, and Why
The same Product entity in three syntaxes, bytes and fragility measured. Google treats them equally, so the reason to choose JSON-LD is coupling, not ranking.
A wrong accessible name breaks voice control and AI agents
aria-label can make the accessibility tree announce a word no one sees. A reproduced WCAG 2.5.3 Label in Name failure, with Agentic Browsing going 0 to 100.
AI Crawlers Don't Run Your JavaScript
GPTBot and ClaudeBot don't render JS. Here's a curl experiment proving client-side pages are invisible to AI search, plus how to fix it server-side.
In sitemap.xml, lastmod Is the Only Field Google Actually Reads
Ship priority 1.0 with changefreq always and Google drops both. The only field it uses is lastmod, and only when verifiably accurate. I ran three sitemaps through the official XSD to see what really counts.
Why color-contrast Disappears When You Put axe-core in CI
axe-core in jsdom catches structural a11y violations without a browser, but color-contrast comes back incomplete, not pass. Why it happens, and how to split CI into two tiers.
5-Day Technical SEO Audit: Gates Mattered More Than Fixes
A 5-day audit of my 4-language blog: 12 broken links, 4 hreflang pairs, 405KB blocking CSS, 21 drifted translations, all fixed and locked in with build gates.
Tie Your JSON-LD Into One @graph Search and AI Can Read
My JSON-LD validated as three disconnected islands. Here's how @id references stitch Organization, WebSite, and Article into one @graph, measured with jsonld.
hreflang Must Be Bidirectional: My 4-Language Blog Audit
I aimed a 30-line checker at my build output: 248 posts passed their hreflang clusters, the homepage failed. Google's reciprocity rules, run logs, and the fix.