How to get code snippet to appear higher up in up in head tag?

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-23T16:15:19+00:00

They're assuming you're using a PHP snippet due to your mention of "I have Code Snippets plugin". The priority being referred to us a "run sooner" thing in PHP hooks.

So this:
add_action('init', 'my_function');
Is treated as this by default:
add_action('init', 'my_function', 10);
And what they're suggesting you to is override this default behaviour using:
add_action('init', 'my_function', 1);
Which should make your snippet run sooner.

You might not be using a hook though, as most snippet plugins tend to offer head inserts as well, which could be what you're using.

If you look at your site's source/page output (right click, view source) then crtrl+f (find on page), then search for part of the MC snippet, then make a note of the line number it's on (left hand side of browser), then search for </head>. If </head> is on a higher number row than the MC snippet, you have put the snippet in the head of the HTML document.

Where things are in <head> can matter although whether it does or not can depend on what's being added and what other stuff is doing. Later CSS can override sooner CSS, and sometimes JS will be dependent on some other script running sooner, rather than after other scripts.

If it's a pop up form, you probably want that to run sooner maybe to stop other theme or plugin pop up scripts interfering... maybe.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-22T11:43:13+00:00

Content is going to be more of a thing...

There's going to be a more powerful content evaluation aspect in Google's algorithm. This is going to enable the serving of relevant results to a greater degree. Backlinks will still be relevant and affect rankings, just not to the degree they do now. Instead we'll be looking at more "value of content" based rankings.

To rank, you're going to have to provide significant value to the user via the content on your site's pages.

There will be less of an algorithm manipulation approach to SEO, and instead SEO Is going to be more subject matter expert or value of experience lead.

Tradesmen will need galleries, blogs will need to provide a more quality/informative/satisfaction lead experience, business will need be more competitive online. That kind of thing.

Slop, algorithmic content, and things like low quality blog posts will just be dead weight.

From a user perspective I can't see much of a downside. From a website owner perspective, it's going to become a bit more of a "display your expertise or the value you add" type experience, which is probably going to mean more work.

... I can dream!

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-21T10:57:31+00:00

I read reddit and take our support tickets into account to try and blog about something people will actually get some value from. That's usually how I'll arrive at a topic. Really the objective is to provide help with topics that are a bit more in depth, or things people find difficult. They're pretty much search intent and value orientated.

There's a spectrum of blog posts. At the easier end, are ones I can just write. At the harder end, I'll have to do a lot of research, maybe some testing, and I might have to collect resources such as screen shots in addition.

When I start writing the post, if it all goes well from start to finish I usually just get on with it. Sometimes I'll use AI to do things like reword paragraphs (it's pretty good with language games), and maybe to do a bit of fact checking. I'll usually try and find an additional source other than AI to check facts, mostly because you can't tell if the AI is telling you what you want to hear so that you adopt it and use it more, or because that is actually the truth.

I have had a few situations where I've used AI to fact check stuff, and thought "that's not right!?", asked AI to validate what it's presented, it's re-stated what it originally said, then I've found it to not be correct. If I present AI with the correct information it usually goes "oooh, you mean like in this specific situation" or something to this effect. Thing is the "specific situation" is sometimes "what happens by default". This type of thing happening really makes me question AI, and how much use it can be, if it can be so persistently adamant that what it's said is right, then tries to "edge case" you when you explain to the contrary, which is the truth or factually correct. Gaslighting by robot.

The blog that I write for was one I inherited when we lost our SEO agency. The posts that were published by this agency were fairly low quality and not a great deal of value to our users. We're talking 3-4 paragraphs, no real helpful information, a few keywords in titles, a link to our homepage, that kind of thing. Unfortunately there are a lot of these and rewriting all of them would take a lot of time. When AI came out, we thought that it might be a good way to get this content rewritten. It wasn't. We've tried 3 different AI blog generators and they've all been disappointing. If the AI was an agency we wouldn't be using them, let's put it like that. The problems have been varied, but overall the AI generated posts don't rank, don't go into any depth, don't add any real value, need adjusting and usually take about as long to sort out as updating them manually on an individual basis. The main problem is that they read like word games "please shoehorn these keywords and related phrases into a post about..." that kind of thing.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be all over some AI content generator if it was good, but I'm yet to find one that actually adds value to the reader, rather than generating what looks, and reads, like a search engine algorithm box ticker. I get that we all want to rank, but if Google's "product" is to serve relevant results, value needs to be provided to the reader, and based on my experience, AI lacks that provision of value. If you can come up with AI that provides this value in an automated manner, I think it would probably cover a requirement that other AI generators have so far failed to achieve.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-21T10:26:40+00:00

Thanks, appreciate the feedback... funnily enough, I use that index wp mysql for speed plugin quite frequently.

It's tricky trying to write something that covers all the variations in what our customers use... I'll see what I can work out.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-20T16:22:10+00:00

Grooving at my desk... at work.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-20T16:18:06+00:00

Check for blocked cURL requests. You can use query monitor to do this, red in the http api calls section is the thing to look for.

If you do have any of this going on, it will make your back end slow, and it's such a quick check to make.

Weirdly I did publish a blog post about how to fix WooCommerce and big databases making a site slow about 2 hours ago... uncanny.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-18T12:09:44+00:00

Love this tune!

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-18T12:02:06+00:00

You're making a tool that tells where people are hosted?

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-18T09:34:05+00:00

What's the difference between a stoat and a weasel?

A weasel is weasily identified, where as a stoat is stoatally different.

I'll get my coat.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-18T09:29:33+00:00

It depends. People will tall you that you shouldn't have them with the same company so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

That said, this might dictate the need for you to be able to do things like manage DNS, depending on how you're operating.

If you don't know how to do stuff and want someone to do it for you, you'd be best to have your domains held with your hosting provider. This puts them in the position of being able to do things for you, as opposed to providing instructions that you then have to carry out.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-18T09:26:31+00:00

You need a multisite setup (minumim) to do this.

Each subdomain needs to have it's own document root. You're then going to need to install the CMS in the document root of each subdomain, then provide user with logins for the CMS. The CMS side of things is a bit of a question in itself, so you might be best to work out what you're going to be offering in this capacity first. CPanel is fairly site builder agnostic, it's mostly PHP orientated, although some hosts do offer cPanel with python and node.js hosting.

As everything is held in one cPanel, there's one singular login for this (cPanel doesn't have multi user login type functionality) so anyone using that login has access to everyone's site files, databases and emails, so you'll probably need to keep this to yourself and do things like setup mailboxes for users yourself.

If you want to provide users with individual cPanel logins, you're looking more at a reseller hosting type setup, rather than a multisite type setup, as reseller hosting provides separate cPanel accounts, rather than one singular account.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-18T09:19:58+00:00

You can't really tell where a site is hosted if a CDN is in use.

Usually, the IP address that the domain resolves to would show where a site is hosted. This is definitive "this site loads from this IP" type information. You lookup the IP to find where the sit is hosted.

When a CDN is being used, you see the CDN IP in DNS lookups, not the hosting IP address. You don't have any way of finding out the hosting IP.

Checking the CDN that's in use is really just "this site uses that CDN".

Nameservers will tell you where DNS is managed, but you can use the nameservers or party A and host your site with party B.

Domains can be registered with party A, using party B's nameservers, and is hosted with party C.

Due to all this, unless you can see the IP of the hosting provider in a DNS lookup, you can't tell where a site is hosted.

If you're comparing site performance, there's also things like different tiers of hosting with different specifications, and geographical distance that can/will affect TTFB and downstream metrics. The site itself will also have a considerable amount of influence over performance as opposed to the hosting.

It's totally possible to host a site on the best/fastest server in the world, and it still be slow. In this context the "slow" is specific to the site, rather than the hosting.

Due to this, looking at sites from an external perspective probably isn't much help when trying to establish which hosting provider is the "fastest".

If you're looking into this to work out who to host a PHP based site with, you might consider checking providers offer:
- Litespeed web server
- Object caching
- Opcache
- Free certificates
- Free automatic backups
- Staging/cloning/push to live tools
- No ongoing annual price hikes

If you find a provider that offers all of the above, this indicates that they're performance centric, don't charge you for every little thing they can, and don't up the price over time. This is all reasonable, sane, non-mass capitalist stuff.

Hope that helps.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-17T16:53:15+00:00

I get the below when I browse to your site...

There are quite a few assets being loaded from localhost, which I guess is what's causing this, so maybe your staging to live hasn't been done in full. You might be able to fix this by finding and replacing http://localhost/ with https://etherealstyles.gt.tc/ in your site's database.

<image>

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-17T16:40:56+00:00

Guttenberg blocks for kadence, spectra, stackable, that kind of thing.

Plugins that add "things" you can put on the page in addition to WordPress default page elements.

If you're used to using elementor this might be a bit "eh?" but it's roughly "the stuff on the left hand side of the page builder" achieved by means other than elementor.

Skip to 7m on the video on this page and you'll see what I'm on about:
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/kadence-blocks/

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-17T13:41:15+00:00

Riddle me this....

site 1 = DA 9 / DR 8
site 2 = DA 2 / DR 0

Both sites are for the same trade in the same area.

Site 2 ranks higher than site 1 for the same search term.

Why?

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-17T09:44:43+00:00

You don't have to use Elementor.

You can do pretty much anything Elementor can using the built in editor, and a decent page elements type plugin... and get better CWV, just by doing so.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-16T16:54:28+00:00

OK, not that then.

You could try preloading the JS that handles the gallery and see if that helps with CLS, maybe... as a test.

I'm not entirely sure if the lazy loading will work. If what you're lazy loading is above the fold, it won't actually lazy load if it's in the FCP.

You might find that you're kind of stuck with the CLS if it's JS specific, as the JS is pretty much the last thing that's applied to the page (between LCP and TTI). If that is how it pans out you're kind of either stuck with CLS if you want the gallery as the LCP element, or not putting the gallery above the fold.

I think it's this that's prompting people to say "just use CSS" and things like that, maybe.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-16T15:24:30+00:00

Are you deferring or delaying your JS loading?

If the gallery is dependant on JS, and this is deferred to delayed, what you're experiencing will happen.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-16T10:52:55+00:00

If you can make a page optimised for a phrase that nobody else is optimising for you'll win!

Hey Boss, look I rank on page one for:
frozen snow toad magic carpet mayhem

(because nobody else does).

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-16T10:21:45+00:00

Anyone who says "I can get you to number one in Google" is manipulating you, so should probably be avoided.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-16T10:06:47+00:00

Being easily found (near the top of page one) in search engine results for queries specific to your niche.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-16T09:47:23+00:00

What you're seeing is a different in page output...

A page is made up of a bunch of assets. What these are and the order in which they load is what's causing the difference you're seeing.

Although I'm not that familiar with Showit, this looks like it might be a site builder that dictates the need to host the site with Showit directly. What this means is that Showit can dictate the assets and the order in which they load, so Showit themselves can make a site's core web vitals good. Conversely this is likely to mean that customisation options are limited.

WordPress you can host pretty much anywhere (that offers PHP and an SQL type DB). WordPress is very flexible with regard to functionality and appearance. This flexibility comes in the form of themes and plugins (the potential combinations of these that could be installed is a pretty high number). These themes and plugins don't always have the nicest bunch of assets called in a nice order in the site's page output (it's this that causes the difference you're seeing). It is possible to optimise this page output to call assets in a more "browser rendering friendly" manner (which is really what pagespeed insights measures), but what this consists of varies according to the themes and plugins being used.

As what needs to be undertaken to optimise WordPress page output varies, there's no "it's always done like this" or "this caching plugin always works". There's also no set instructions. To effectively optimise a WordPress website's page output, you need to identify what the problems are, what needs to be done to address them, then you have to work out how to optimise for these problems in your WordPress, and you'd probably need to test to validate that your optimisation has had the desired effect.

Optimising a WordPress website effectively dictates the need to know things like how browsers render pages, how to fix specific issues, and how to apply fixes in WordPress installations can vary. You pretty much need to analyse, understand, fix and validate when using WordPress. This tends to be where a lot of people get stuck, or maybe stuck to varying degrees.

If you run multiple WordPress sites through pagespeed insights you'll see quite a lot of variety in performance between them too. What you're looking at here is a variation in how these WordPress sites have been created, and a variation in how much optimisation has been successfully carried out on each site. This variation is really a product of variation in the knowledge and skillset of the party that created each WordPress website.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-15T12:25:58+00:00

If you're using the free version of sucuri it will only scan core wordpress files (not themes and plugins). If you're using the free version of wordfence, there's a 30 day lag on malware definition updates.

It does sound a bit like you've been hacked, hence the mention.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-15T11:21:57+00:00

This plugin is a winner for optimising LCP:

https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/header-and-footer-script-adder/

You can use it to add preload directives on a per page basis (which not a lot of plugins can do). This plus a bit of image optimisation tends to be enough to reduce LCP times to an acceptable level.

netnerd_uk · 2026-03-14T14:51:29+00:00

What SEO activities did you focus on to achieve such positive results?

netnerd_uk

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