Product updates, performance, SEO

[Alejandro]

Hi,

Updates for JReviews, MyLists, PaidListings and UserProfiles were released yesterday. These are maintenance releases with bug fixes, but also contain new features, as well several enhancements to existing functionality. You can get detailed information in the changelogs and below you can find the most interesting changes.

JReviews

• Synchronous loading for Listing Type detail page widgets to improve Internal Linking SEO. In plain terms, that means, in the same request as the rest of the page. Whereas the default behavior is to load them asynchronously (via ajax) in a separate request, it's not exactly clear whether search engines will see the content of these widgets as part of the page. So this new feature ensures that it does and that it can contribute to internal linking for SEO. Do keep in mind that disabling asynchronous loading means processing more things in a single request, so that can also affect performance. So it's important to reach a balance here. Don't add 10 synchronous widgets to the same page! The setting can be toggled for each individual widget, so to get started go to any listing type where you've setup a widget and disable asynchronous loading:

• Native image lazy loading support for Chrome. Chrome 76 added native lazy loading support for images back in August and we've now updated several areas of JReviews to take advantage of this feature by adding the loading="lazy" attribute to images. This means that loading of images happens on demand, instead of in bulk, when the images are scrolled into view. This can shave off a few seconds of page loading time on long pages with a lot of images. It also saves bandwidth and memory.
• YouTube embedding now works without the need for a YouTube API key. Over the last few months users have reported losing the ability to embed YouTube videos. This is because Google has suddenly decided to disable the YouTube API for users that don't use it frequently enough, and there's no way to get it active again without having to create a new Google console project. This is annoying to say the least. So now there's a backup method using the noembed.com API. This is useful mostly to get things working and be able to get the video title, because it doesn't provide the video description nor duration. So the YouTube API provides a bit more info, but in cases where this stops working, or when the YouTube API is not used at all, JReviews will still be able to embed the YouTube videos.

There are a few other improvements in this release, so make sure you refer to the changelog for details.

MyLists, PaidListings

Both MyLists and PaidListings now have some automated clean-up/maintenance functionality added via Cron, to remove orphaned records and synchronize counts, etc. Make sure you have the JReviews cron setup on your server to run frequently, every minute, instead of relaying on site visits to run it. Not all maintenance tasks will run on site visits because they can degrade performance. Refer to the cron setup in the documentation.

Enjoy! 

Alejandro