https://willcocks.uk/ Notes on web development, advertising operations, and small-business websites — from a freelance developer in South Devon. en-gb Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:10:53 GMT https://willcocks.uk/articles/website-speed-bad-connection https://willcocks.uk/articles/website-speed-bad-connection Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT We obsess over Lighthouse scores, but to someone standing outside your café on a patchy Dartmoor lane, or reading between Tube stations, speed is simpler than that — the page either loads before they give up, or it doesn't. What the research actually says about how many you lose, and why a static site is the fix. https://willcocks.uk/articles/ai-reads-your-website https://willcocks.uk/articles/ai-reads-your-website Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT I pulled a month of server logs for one client and found AI reading their pages more than every human visitor combined — none of it visible in analytics. What that means, how AI actually visits your site, and why some hosting quietly blocks the fastest-growing way to be found. https://willcocks.uk/articles/emdash-cloudflare-cms-future https://willcocks.uk/articles/emdash-cloudflare-cms-future Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT A short note on EmDash, the Astro-based CMS Cloudflare released in beta last month. The architecture is genuinely interesting — sandboxed plugins, capability manifests, end-to-end TypeScript — and it solves the worst of WordPress's structural problems by design. I am not deploying it yet. I think it is the future. https://willcocks.uk/articles/why-im-switching-to-static-sites https://willcocks.uk/articles/why-im-switching-to-static-sites Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT I used to recommend WordPress to every small business that walked through the door. I don't anymore. A note on the maintenance treadmill, the cumulative cost of plugins, and the recent supply-chain attacks that made me reconsider what "easy" actually means. https://willcocks.uk/articles/why-cookieless-analytics https://willcocks.uk/articles/why-cookieless-analytics Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Why I run two kinds of analytics on the sites I build — accurate, cookieless measurement for the truth, and Google Analytics for the trends and the features it is genuinely good at, gated behind real consent. https://willcocks.uk/articles/cloudflare-edge-vs-siteground-traditional-hosting https://willcocks.uk/articles/cloudflare-edge-vs-siteground-traditional-hosting Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT A plain-English explanation of what "hosting" actually does, why Cloudflare's edge model is structurally different from traditional shared hosting like SiteGround, and why most of the websites that load fastest on your phone today are running on infrastructure that didn't exist when WordPress was designed.