SEO Fundamentals for WordPress - SEOMike …...SEO Fundamentals: Keywords • Know how your customers search for your product or service • Don’t guess what people search • Check
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#GEWKC @SEOMike SEO Fundamentals For Your WordPress Site Michael Black, SEOMike
• Keyword Research • Title Tag Optimization • Description Tag Optimization • Mobile Friendliness • Site Speed • Measure
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Going to start with some SEO fundamentals SEO applies to all sites, not just wordpress We’ll get to the wordpress optimization
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SEO Fundamentals: Keywords
• Know how your customers search for your product or service • Don’t guess what people search • Check competing websites for the words they use • Use the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool • Use Ubersuggest.org
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Get in your user’s head Your favorite keyword might not be the best
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SEO Fundamentals: Keywords
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Query was “decorative concrete” These are returned as “most popular”
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SEO Fundamentals: Keywords
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This is starting to stem from “a” All other letters and numbers available
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SEO Fundamentals: Keywords
• Differences in spelling can mean different results
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Different spelling can mean different intent Difference in number of results is 40 mil
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Let’s look at this as an SEO… At first glance, it looks the same I’ve greyed out things like adwords and maps for this example
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Different number of results Google Shopping results on the top of the left. Intent to buy. Google maps on the left in two spots. Google thinks intent is to buy locally Right has “news”. Right has “related questions” Right is about research left is about purchase Each set takes a totally different approach
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No site stays in the same ranking. Significant shifts in ranking for sites that do cross queries. Difference in ranking show differences in relevance to user query / set of results / google’s interpreted intent
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These sites don’t appear in both sets of results.
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All differences Even top links are different TRANSITION TO TITLE TAGS
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Title Tag Optimization
• When properly formatted and optimized, your title tag is likely to display as the blue link in Google when your site appears in the search results.
• Length is important so your tag doesn’t get truncated. You have about 70 characters, including spaces, to say what you want.
• 70 characters is a guideline. The width actually comes down to 512 characters. You can get more “I”s than you can “O”s.
• A strong title tag will increase your organic clickthrough rate. • Google uses your title tag as a ranking factor.
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Title tags are one of the first things google checks to determine relevance to query Irrelevant title tags lead to poor ranking If your tag is too long it will be truncated
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Description Tag Optimization
• When properly formatted and optimized, your description tag is likely to display as the two-line blurb below your link in Google when your site appears in the search results.
• Description tags will also be truncated if they are too long. Since a description tag is two lines long, you get about 155 characters.
• The available length will vary because Google might include a date or something else along with your description tag.
• A strong description tag will increase your organic clickthrough rate. • Google does not use your description tag as a ranking factor.
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Tag too long = truncated
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Title & Description Tag Example
• Include a keyword in the beginning of your title and description. • Clear communication of relevance to query (target keyword). • Clear communication of call to action. • Fits the character limitations.
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Title & Description Optimization
• Your title and description needs to stand out so you have a better chance of getting a click than your competition.
• Google is also your competition. • Google’s parent company Alphabet made $27.77 billion in Q3. They
didn’t make a dime on organic clicks.
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Alphabet makes most of their money from Google.com
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According to StatCounter, 1366 x 768 is
the most popular desktop screen
resolution
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Are the results biased towards Google? These are typical shopping results. Homedepot is probably really happy with their strong organic ranking
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34 of the 38 links above
the fold keep the user on Google. 29 links above
the fold make Google
money. Four links go to an organic result.
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Google does everything they can to keep a user on their site. Google tries to make money at every turn Green links make google no money It wasn’t always this way. Google used to really favor organic results The amount of space taken at the top by Google has increased a lot over the years.
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Mobile Friendliness
• A site that works well on a mobile device is no longer a luxury. • Over 60% of Google searches happen on a mobile device. • Google has been maintaining a separate set of results skewed to
favor sites that are mobile friendly. • Google has been pushing for mobile friendly design since about
2010. • Mobile friendly means responsive design.
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Responsive design means that the site will resize and rearrange based on the user’s screen size.
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Google’s Mobile-First Index
• Google is moving to a mobile-first index in 2018. • Google is already testing the mobile-first index. • This is the first time I’ve seen Google test such a drastic change
during the holiday shopping season. • Google’s mobile-first index will be the biggest change in their 19
year history.
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Mobile-first will be the biggest change ever For the first time google will not show results based on what works best on a desktop TRANSITION TO GOOGLE MOBILE FRIENDLY CHECK
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Mobile Friendliness
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Check your site’s mobile friendliness right from the SERPs
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Mobile Friendliness
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If you pass you get green in the tool. If not, google gives you a list of things to fix. Fixing them can be quite tricky. TRANSITION TO SITE SPEED
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Site Speed
• Google prefers sites that load quickly. • Site speed will have a more dramatic impact on desktop rankings
than ever before because of the mobile-first index. • Google prefers sites that load in two seconds or less. • If your site speed is eight seconds or more, your speed becomes a
big factor in ranking and can lead to a page two or three suppression of your result.
• We’ll talk more about site speed in a bit…
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Mobile-first index means that sites are ranked by how they work on mobile A fast site is better for mobile A fast site will rank better in mobile-first results
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HTTPS
• Last month Google began showing “Not secure” warnings for sites that do not use HTTPS in their Chrome browser.
• In October, Chrome was the #1 browser for mobile and desktop users.
• On pages that take input from a user in a form, including a search box, Google will “fly out” a “Not secure” warning in the browser bar when a user begins to enter information into a form’s field.
• Google’s warning is invasive enough to kill conversions on non-secure forms.
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If you don’t have https – where have you been?
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HTTPS
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This is how it works now. Before entering data in a field, the little I is there. First keystroke brings out the “not secure” TRANSITION TO GA
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Measure: Google Analytics
• Google Analytics is a free tool that measures traffic on your website. • Setup is free at analtyics.google.com • If you work with an agency, do not give them your main login. Setup
manger access for them. • Google tracks users through a small javascript. Google tracks a crazy
amount of information about user interaction. • Google probably knows more about you than the government. • You must include certain language in your privacy policy if you use GA.
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I will only touch on some highlights to make it more accessible GA is a great way to spend a ton of time GA is intimidating if you aren’t familiar with it There are tons of resources online to learn about GA
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Measure: Google Analytics
• Who is your audience? • Where do they come from? • When do they come? • What do they do? • What leads to an exit? • What leads to a conversion? • What pages have high bounce rates?
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Some important questions Ask your questions before getting into GA to stay on track
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Measure: Google Analytics
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The tracking code looks like this
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Opening screen in GA A quick overview Hourly usage is great Realtime metrics to the right A bunch more info below
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Find the age of your user Find the gender of your user Use these reports to find how different age groups interact / convert Demographics only works if enabled
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Neat illustration of age usage You can see if there are differences in conversion
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Realtime report Shows device usage Pageviews per second sources
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Acquisition -> channels Good info on how people reach your site. Good jumping off point This is where I start every day
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Goals are super important Measure user conversion Not all goals are downloads / purchases Goals can be that someone reached the second or third page of search results Goals help you figure out who is most engaged.
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Measure: Google Analytics
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Goal completion overview This client has no dollar amounts assigned to interactions
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Measure: Google Search Console
• Google Search Console is a free tool for webmasters. • There is no code to implement. • Google records the information anyway, you might as well use it! • All you have to do is sign up!
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GSC used to be webmaster tools It’s been around for many years Has lots of good info
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Measure: Google Search Console
• Check for crawl errors • Fetch and Render • Submit a sitemap
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If you do nothing else with it, do these things
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Dashboard showing errors, clicks and sitemaps. Clicks are usually different from what is reported in analytics
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Errors screen Scroll down on this screen for a detailed list of errors Fix the problem then mark as fixed
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Fetch and render Have Google fetch and render pages to see how the pages look to them This says partial. Always check
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Partial load because of an offsite resource blocked by that offsite robots.txt
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Sitemap warnings / errors will show up here If you have errors / warnings google will stop trusting the sitemap When they don’t trust the sitemap, they don’t index it anymore TRANSITION TO SEO FOR WORDPRESS
Touch on some of the most important stuff No way I can get to it all
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Selecting a Theme
• There are a ton of WordPress themes available both paid and free. • Check WordPress’ list of free themes and you might find one you
like for free. • Some free themes are only free for personal use, not commercial
use. • Test the examples provided to see if they are mobile friendly. • Make sure the developer has been around a while. You want them
to continue to support your theme.
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ABOUT HALFWAY DONE Wordpress.org site -> themes Not all themes are equal. Some are very, very slow Not all themes are designed for the same thing Some themes are very ecommerce, some are very blog Some themes are for photographers, etc. When modifying files, use a child theme Keep shit up to date!
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Selecting a Theme
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TRANSITION TO -> configuring wordpress
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WordPress Settings
• Make sure search bots can access your site. Do not check this box.
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Screenshots taken from WP backend Make sure this check mark is not ticked This will do a robots.txt disallow Bad stuff Should be un-ticked by default
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WordPress Settings
• Use friendly URLs
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Permalinks are important Best practice is for friendly URLs which means easy for a user to read
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WordPress Settings
• Use friendly URLs
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I use the custom format
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WordPress Settings
• Define www or non-www
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Let WordPress canonicalize for you Canonical means one version of a url Site title, etc. Basic WP setup stuff
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WordPress Settings
• Auto-close comments to prevent spam (found under “Discussion”).
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People will come back to long-closed topics and comment spam Stop it from filling your queue by limiting the time a post is open to comment
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WordPress Settings
• Require manual approval of comments to prevent spam
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Always manually approve a comment -> TRANSITION TO PLUGINS
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Plugins for SEO
• Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress by a long way. • All in One SEO Pack is a good alternative if you don’t like Yoast. • SEO Manager for WordPress is another alternative to Yoast. • Site Speed is important to SEO. W3Total Cache works in most
hosting environments. • Consider minification plugins but beware they often require coding
abilities to troubleshoot.
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Not going to cover minification plugins here. Too much. Yoast has some. Yoast is up first
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Plugins: Yoast
• Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin with over 1 million active installs.
• Yoast extends your ability to control your pages by making it possible to specify page-level title and description tags.
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We use yoast on all our client WP installs
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Plugins: Yoast
• Yoast provides simple optimization by offering a configuration wizard which can be found on Yoast’s dashboard.
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It’s not that hard to setup. Built-in config tool that gets you in good shape
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Plugins: Yoast
• Be sure to fill in your homepage’s title and description tag.
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Set your homepage’s default title and description This is very important if you don’t use a static page because it’s your only good chance
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Plugins: Yoast
• Set or adjust the default title and meta tag for posts.
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The “need help” will show you formatting examples.
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Plugins: Yoast
• Make sure “Meta Robots” is set to “index”.
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This is like the block search bots we saw in WordPress’ settings earlier
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Plugins: Yoast
• Enable XML Sitemaps and submit the main sitemap to Google via Google Search Console.
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Click the blue link to get your sitemap’s URL to submit to Google and include in robots
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Plugins: Yoast
• Use Yoast’s file editor to make sure your sitemap.xml file is linked in your robots.txt. This does not happen by default.
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Add the link to the sitemap in robots.txt by clicking “file editor”
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Plugins: Yoast
• Use Yoast’s file editor to make sure you sitemap.xml file is linked in your robots.txt. This does not happen by default.
Add the line above to your robots.txt Do not mess with your htaccess file unless you know what you’re doing. You can really jack up your site.
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Plugins: Yoast
• Exclude pages from your sitemap that you don’t really need, like your “thank you” page.
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I exclude my thank you pages Don’t want them in the search listings
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Plugins: Yoast
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Shows the title and description editor on a page The bar turns from orange to green as you fill it in Yoast shows a nice preview Use the “focus keyword” for yoast to score your page More info if you scroll down (NEXT SLIDE)
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Plugins: Yoast
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Yoast doesn’t like my glossary page This will give you specific instructions for optimizing your content. It’s ok advice and generally won’t steer you wrong. TRANSITION TO W3 TOTAL CACHE
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Plugins: W3 Total Cache
WARNING!! • W3 Total Cache might not work with your hosting environment. • Some settings will jack up your site badly if done incorrectly. • It’s possible to jack up wp-admin access and prevent you from accessing
your site. If you don’t think you can disable W3 Total Cache via FTP (and remove its cache files), this plugin might not be for you.
• If you break your site, don’t blame me. • When in doubt, hire it out!
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The following slides have pretty safe settings that will speed your site. Mess with advanced stuff, and you might break your site. This plugin does not work at WP engine Some other hosts might block it Some hosts like Siteground have built in caching as well, but this works well with them.
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Plugins: W3 Total Cache
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All these options are available after install This is page caching. A page will be cached after it’s rendered by the server for the first time. Large increase in speed of the site. First load of the page is slow.
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Plugins: W3 Total Cache
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Minify means that all the whitespace is taken out of your code. This can jack up the way your site looks. Try enabling it and if it looks bad, just disable Flush the cache after on / off
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Plugins: W3 Total Cache
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The database cache helps speed the site Usually available
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Plugins: W3 Total Cache
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Browser caching helps the user’s browser remember things between sessions
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Plugins: W3 Total Cache
• If you make a change and it doesn’t show on your page, empty your cache.
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Always purge the cache after changing images Always purge the cache after changing css or js Always purge the cache after updating plugins If you don’t see a change you made, purge the cache TRANSITION TO MONSTERINSIGHTS
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Plugins: MonsterInsights
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Simple to use GA integration You can view some reports right in WP-Admin Integrates the GA tracker on your website You must have a GA account already
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Plugins: MonsterInsights
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Inside the dashboard Scrolling down shows more stuff I don’t look at this too much as it has less info than GA
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WordPress Speed
• Site speed has been important to Google as far back as 2008. • Google has been using site speed as a ranking indicator since 2010. • Use Webpagetest.org to diagnose your site’s speed.
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Speed is key Webpagetest.org helps a lot because you see individual resources loading.
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WordPress Speed
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Shows you the load time right up front Visually complete is a big deal and is when a page is loaded.
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WordPress Speed
Webpagetest.org
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A full load tree Click on any one item and see details
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WordPress Speed
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Time to first byte in blue PLUS the cert! Not bad here. Cert was expensive. I need to fire godaddy because of the cert negotiation time NEXT SLIDE IS LONG TTFB
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WordPress Speed
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10 SLIDES TO GO Here’s a jacked up TTFB Super long This is very bad Usually conflicting or broken plugins Disable plugins until time comes down If time does not come down, it could be your WP install You might also have the wrong hosting plan and your host is throttling you… or inept.
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WordPress Speed
The long purple line is a 1.3mb image file. Right-size your images!
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That loooooong purple line is an image loading. This particular image is 1.3mb We see this all the time If you upload a full-size image, it’s loaded in full on a page and then “squished” to fit You must right-size images before posting or you’ll choke your site. NEXT SLIDE IS PREFETCH STUFF
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WordPress Speed
• You can speed your site by using DNS prefetches and preconnects. • DNS stands for Domain Name System. • DNS tells your computer where a resource lives. • DNS lookups take time and the request must wait for a response. • DNS prefetching allows a browser to make DNS requests before the
resource is needed. • DNS prefetching can shave seconds off of your load time. • DNS prefetching is very low-hanging fruit. • WordPress prefetches some things by default, but you should add more!
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WordPress Speed
DNS Prefetching is
cool!
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The little teal lines is where my site does prefetches / preconnects Dependent content doesn’t wait for dns
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WordPress Speed
• DNS Prefetching allows the browser to perform DNS lookups in the background, before they are needed.
• Preconnecting allows a browser to setup a connection to an offsite resource and keep that connection open for future requests. This is great for CDNs.
Example of preconnecting. This is also great if you use offsite fonts from google Also good for offsite css / js Install code like this in the header. How? Next slide TRANSITION TO ADD HEAD CODE FIVE MORE SLIDES
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WordPress Speed
• If you aren’t comfortable with adding code to your header file, you can add it using a plugin.
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This is the plugin I use when we need to customize header code and can’t edit it in the theme Some clients don’t have child themes (stupid) Changes would be reverted with theme update unless using this
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WordPress Speed
Add sitewide head and footer code in a
single place.
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Add sitewide rules here. Ours is added using a child theme, otherwise add it here
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WordPress Speed
Add onpage code at the bottom of a
page’s editor.
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You can add code to specific pages here as well. NEXT SLIDE IS SECURITY PSA YOU’RE ALMOST DONE!
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Site Security PSA
• Never send login credentials via email • Never send credit card information via email. • Email travels from your computer to its destination via multiple
unsecured hops. • Your email could travel through 20+ servers between your
computer and its destination. • Any hop can have an interloper scanning for juicy stuff. • Always call the recipient to communicate login information.
