We know that page speed is essential to high engagement. We have always worked hard to make sure that when Slickstream is added to your site, we have the minimum possible impact on page load times and performance.
Recently we've heard from publishers that Slickstream has become an essential part of their sites and it is important that Slickstream's features appear as quickly as possible on the page. Where we had previously intentionally deferred our own loading to "get out of the way", we now need to make sure that search and other widgets are available ASAP.
In our latest update, we've made some changes that enable faster loading of Slickstream widgets and even reduce our impact on the loading of the rest of your page (images, ads, etc.)
To get the benefit of this change, you need to do two things:
- Update your embed code; and
- Update your caching plugin settings to exclude Slickstream for inline javascript
Read More: Full Instructions on Updating
If you don't take these actions, Slickstream will continue to work, but you won't get the full benefit of this update.
Once you make these changes, you'll probably notice that Slickstream widgets appear on your page MUCH faster. That's because we're using some tricks to cache both code and state information locally in the browser so that, in many cases, we don't have to load any network resources before we can inject our widgets on the page.
To update your embed code, if you use the Slickstream WordPress plugin, update it to the latest version (1.1.3). If you put our embed code directly into your <head>, you will need to replace the current embed code with a new one. The new one looks very different as it includes a small block of inline javascript rather than a script file to load from our servers.
It is also important that you exclude Slickstream from your cache optimizer. Even if you previously excluded Slickstream, you need to change this because the new embed code uses inline javascript rather than a script URL to be loaded. Now you must exclude any inline javascript containing "slickstream".
We'd be happy to help, of course. Just shoot us an email at support@slickstream.com.
