Podcast Episode 13: Website Health & Performance For Better SEO
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[00:00:45] Cyberpunk Geeks, marketing mixer. If you are joining us today, we are talking about website Health and SEO on Pip Seymour Digital Media. And this is Greg with Original [00:01:00] 72 Creative. Our Powers combined. We discuss digital marketing now, Greg? Yes. We were talking this week about how you log into your website and there's like a WordPress and they give you like a health score and that stresses some clients out.
[00:01:19] And then we were talking about kind of some of the things they're telling you to do and I was confused. I was. Why is my health score related to the inactive themes? And so can you talk about the health score and what we're seeing when we log into our website? Yeah. So basically, and some people might not even have seen it because it is down.
[00:01:46] Within the tools menu, sub menu kind of thing. But when you first log into your website, there's the main dashboard, and if you look at the main dashboard, which I never do because I find the [00:02:00] dashboard pretty useless myself, but there is a card on the dashboard and it says Site health. And there's it says things like should be improved or like you have things that need to be taken care of kind of a thing.
[00:02:16] And if you click it, it will take you to that site health section where it'll give you critical issues, recommendations, things like that. And I find most people that use. WordPress are not like me or maybe yourself who know WordPress and know what we're looking at. They're just the users or the owners of the site who we've built it for, and see these messages and get all freaked out like, Oh my God, I have critical issues on my site.
[00:02:57] What are they? And then they contact you like, what's going. [00:03:00] So there is this section called Site Health, and it does give you these things, but most of the time, as I had mentioned, creepshow, it flags things like there are plugins that are installed but not activated. There are other themes that are installed but not active.
[00:03:20] And while there could be potential issues with the plugins, they're really. Critical issues, which is where I find it scares people, right? And they can't go away. I typically don't have plugins installed and not activated. I like to keep that clean, but sometimes there might be a case where you want to use a plug-in at certain points.
[00:03:52] For speed sake. You deactivate it when you're not using it, but you don't want to delete it and reinstall it the [00:04:00] next time you wanna do it. So you just leave it there. I don't find that super bad to have. It doesn't affect you, right? Like in, I mean in that, if it wants an update, because it's not active, the files aren't, you don't open or close the file, the files aren't gonna affect your site, right?
[00:04:17] That's right. That's. And so it's fi cuz I have Christmas. I know you love my plugin. Christmas buy, they also do Halloween and you get little things moon across the screen. I know how much you hate those. So I have that turned off cuz why am I gonna turn that on all year? But I don't like the red when it just be red.
[00:04:36] I have to update right my sight. But I always wondered about updating the plugins and if they weren't activated. So I don't need to, I don't need to update them if they're not activated. You should still update them and they won't cause any issue on your site. But definitely if you do have a plugin that isn't active on your site, you'll still want to update that just for security's sake.
[00:04:59] And that's the thing [00:05:00] about updating a plugin on your site that's not active, will not do anything to your site. It'll just update whatever software is on the. For that inactive plugin. And so if I have plugins that I don't update, that is an issue because it can cause some problems with security.
[00:05:19] Yeah. Because most of the time there's a couple of reasons why things get updated is because there is some type of a security hole in it or a vulnerability in it, or there's new features. So take advantage of the new features and update or. If just in case it's a patch to something that could have a vulnerability on your site.
[00:05:44] Okay. And so what about the themes? I have three or four themes sitting there on my site that I don't use. Should I delete those? I would, and I would only leave one. [00:06:00] Theme in there as a backup, and typically I suggest it be one of the default or the latest default WordPress theme. And the reason for that is because there may, in the future, when you update your theme that you're using, it may cause a problem on your site.
[00:06:23] And one of the ways to figure. If it's a plugin or WordPress or your theme that's causing an issue is to revert back to the default theme to see if the issue is still there, which would indicate that if it's gone, then it's an issue with your theme that you need to figure out. Also, sometimes if you don't have a backup theme and something does go wrong, Then your site would completely be gone.
[00:06:56] Whereas if you update WordPress and [00:07:00] something happened, at least that default theme would be able to kick in. If there's no other theme, then nothing would happen. Okay, so I don't need to pay attention to those things except keep it default. Update my plugins and the site health we're seeing on WordPress now, that's one place we see Site Health, right?
[00:07:18] There's a whole bunch of other places you can look at Site health. Yeah and also I just touched on. Really the theme warnings and the plug-in warnings, but there are a bunch of other things that could be up there. One of the common ones that I see clients coming asking me about is upgrading your php.
[00:07:39] If the server is running an older version of php, oftentimes it'll say you should update to the latest, which is good. So there is a handful of things that are in. That are either recommendations or actual issues and you should bring them up to people. Let's go back to the PHP [00:08:00] cause I think that can take a significant amount of time to update and it's something a developer needs to generally do.
[00:08:07] It doesn't take much time to update. , but it could cause you some major headaches. Okay, so there is a possibility because, So PHP is a programming language, which is most of the WordPress and plugins. It's all based on php, so running the latest version of PHP or an old version of php. There are things that get depreciated or.
[00:08:38] Into that module that run on the server that allow you to code what your site is doing and function. So if you were to get a new feature within WordPress that is dependent on something that is in a newer version of PHP and you're on the older version, but you upgrade your [00:09:00] site, then those things will not work and could cause you like a critical error and just have a 500 error server.
[00:09:08] And show a white screen that, that type of a thing, so a PHP error could completely take down your entire site. Sounds great. So I, That's a panic phone call. Pretty much. Yep. Now we know that the new version of WordPress is coming out. Six point something. I think one, it's actually. And is that gonna have a updated PHP everything for 6.1?
[00:09:36] I believe there's no indication that this new version, you need to actually upgrade PHP to a certain level. There is always a minimum set of what PHP version you need to run WordPress. So as long as you're running that minimum version. It will still work. There would be a [00:10:00] point possibly in the future where WordPress will say, Okay, everybody needs to be on at least this version of p for anything moving forward, but they would tell you before you do an update that there's a dependency on X level of P H P for that version to run properly.
[00:10:26] Huh? Cause that's an issue I've seen where I look at Fallon and I'm like, There's a problem . Cuz that's not just, that's not where I'm strong. Developers are strong there. They don't, they look at code stuff and if it's red they don't have a meltdown and stop reading. But if you learn to keep reading, you usually find out problems and solutions.
[00:10:45] Now, are there other things that, that this health of WordPress tells us? There's a ton of things. It's impossible to go through them all, but people can look at their site health and have a look. There's [00:11:00] things for performance, there's things for security, there's critical items. But I think those are the major ones that people of get freaked out on is maybe the php and then I don't like, cuz it's not really a thing to freak out.
[00:11:15] Is like The warnings of you have plugins installed and not activated. Okay. They're not activated. There's no problem there. I have the same, Oh, go on. Sorry. What? And the theme's the same thing. You have a theme that's not activated. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God. It's true. I have the same problem in Google Ads with Google Ads.
[00:11:36] Added the button of an optimization score, which literally they have proven that everything that is recommended in. Is for Google, not for the client. And, but I do go in and update it so the, I don't get those panicked calls saying, Oh my God, my optimization score went down, cuz I'm just like, Don't worry.
[00:11:56] But that being said, there are other places like [00:12:00] I, So have you ever gone to Pingdom uh.com and done a test? I like them. Google Search Console gives you an ability to do health tests on your site. Yeah. Which are related to speed and how close buttons are and all the things. And the stuff that. People pretty overwhelmed pretty quick cuz it's pretty technical.
[00:12:22] I can fix image sizes, which is usually one of the main problems. But there's other things, and I know that you've been frustrated with the health scores because the actual number doesn't necessarily reflect what is going on. And we've had clients get a you do stuff and it changes and it doesn't change in the right direction and they're more.
[00:12:45] Yeah you, I've had situations where I was looking at a site and trying to get a better page score, optimize their site and stuff like that. And you could initially look and [00:13:00] the page score could be, let's say 75 just for the hell of it. And then you start working on some of the items and fixing.
[00:13:09] Things that they say are wrong, and as you do that, the page score could go up, but it also could go down, I've noticed, because it seems to show you a certain amount of items. And then as you fix those, you'll do another test and it'll just give you more items. To look at, right? So I, it's not like I have never had the situation where I've done one of these tests and it's given you everything that's wrong with the site.
[00:13:46] So I don't know how these things work exactly, but this is why I get frustrated with people when they're like, Oh my God, we need to up the page score. We're like, Who cares about the page score? Let's just test it and [00:14:00] see what the things that are wrong. The suggestions on how we can improve the site's performance.
[00:14:08] And make those improvements, right? Because after you've made all of those improvements, you could still have a bad or a not great page. Want to know more about seo? We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses using the most up to date search engine marketing optimization techniques and tools.
[00:14:35] Find out [email protected]. And the only thing that really matters okay, lots of things matter and you'll learn this stuff over time. Like they do the first paint and all this stuff and they're using acronyms that are a little bit like, Oh God, what is that? Oh my God, I don't understand this language.
[00:14:56] And ah, I think the main thing you just wanna pay attention to is your sight [00:15:00] speed. If it's under three seconds, I think three seconds. What you want before people just give up, right? And I think that's the most important aspect, right? You want things to work on your site. If they don't work, it's bad user experience and therefore bad seo, right?
[00:15:15] But are you gonna hyper focus on all these things? Did you know that you could have poor site speed? You can get a plugin, you can probably fix that. Look at these. , right? We sped up somebody's site, like dramatically from, I forget what the plugin is. I'll have to add it, but so technical stuff to fix like 4 0 4 pages.
[00:15:35] Those are bad user experiences. Those are the things to, to look at and pay attention to over all this other stuff, right? Yeah. Image sizes are a quick win, yeah. Image sizes, because images, , everybody uses images on their site, right? If you can optimize your images as best possible, it will be a big [00:16:00] win to your overall speed of loading.
[00:16:03] The site is a huge factor for that because the weight of what is being loaded is gonna be most critical to. How quickly your site loads, and this is a good example of how you could have a fast loading site or a slow loading site, but have a good or bad pay speed score. Because if you optimize all your images and your site loads quick, you might still have a bad page score because there's so many other things that are wrong with your.
[00:16:38] But it loads fast because everything's optimized to be as small as it can, but there could be like a ton of other issues that are not as critical to the load speed, but still have impacts on your seo. Yeah. Cause it's all about user experience in [00:17:00] the end. Who likes landing on a 4 0 4 page?
[00:17:02] Who likes a slow site or when they kick a button? I some, There's some pretty creative 4 0 4 pages. There are some great 4 0 4 pages that make you smile. We have a list actually of ones we've collected that are so good. I think the ninjas, they're in Britain. They have a wicked 4 0 4 page. Cuz if you optimize your 4 0 4 page it's brilliant, right?
[00:17:23] So you can make somebody laugh. The best place I think to look. Four issues is Google Search Console. It's free. It's from Google. You know they tell you when you have 4 0 4 pages cuz you do something stupid on your site. Not like I've done that have a bunch of 4 0 4 pages right now, but, So if I was looking to make some easy wins, there's plugins, word fence I think is the one.
[00:17:48] We used for speeding up the site, but there's lazy loading too. Can you talk about that? Cause that's lazy loading is basically the loading of images that are [00:18:00] below the fold once you've scrolled to them. So if you have a really long page and there's images all the way down the page, the images that are below what you can see, don't get loaded.
[00:18:13] Automat. They only get loaded as you start to scroll down. So that's something that's native in WordPress now, but also a lot of plugins, optimization plugins, there are flags to be able to turn that on and off as well. I would say for search engine optimization purposes with your website, there's a couple.
[00:18:40] Really critical things, I think would be the biggest impact to your SEO would be make sure there's no broken links on your site. No broken images. Make sure you don't have an excessive amount of redirects or 3 0 1 s. That seems to be something that the search engines don't like being [00:19:00] redirected a ton.
[00:19:01] So if you could minimize and that's really good, that speaks volumes to. When you do certain SEO things, cause it it would be much smarter than to do seo, things like keyword research, picking a specific keyword string for a page or two, because then you'll have it in your URL right as you're creating the site, and then you won't be doing the redirect.
[00:19:29] And yeah, so I think it's always best to do s. When the developers creating the site and having a team effort. Which is hard to do for some reason. SEO seems to be an afterthought. People often build their websites thinking that I'll just build a website, I'll build a business, and they'll just come, yeah. It's never an afterthought for me. While I don't actively just do SEO specifically for companies like [00:20:00] clients don't typically come to me to be like, Oh, great, okay, I need to SEO my site. Now. I typically leave that to the professionals, like if a site hasn't already been built like that, and you need.
[00:20:13] Help to do that. Then you go to a company and they specialize in SEO and helping you with keywords and stuff like that. But every site that I build, because I know most of the basics of seo, probably more, but I hate saying I know everything is, I build the site and I'm building knowing that these are how they need to be.
[00:20:38] For SEO purposes. So I'm just automatically building things in that way. Yeah. Which is helpful to be honest, because then it, it sets people up for more success later. Now going back to plugins can weigh a site down. So you don't want more than what, 10 plugins maybe.[00:21:00]
[00:21:00] That's a misconception. Tell me more. Yeah I don't know if we, I think we did a topic way back in the day on, on whether or not the number of plugins that you're using matters cause your site to be slower. And so what happens is additional plug-ins are just additional code and additional function.
[00:21:29] The additional code and functionality should not excessively weigh your site down anymore. So you could have five plugins, or you could have 20 plugins and the site would not be impacted. What would impact your speed is if one or two of those plugin. We're shitty plugins not coded very well, that are causing problems and slowness on your site [00:22:00] so no, there's not really a number of plugins that you should stick to or stick under.
[00:22:07] You should really make sure the health of your plugins the reputability of them, who's made them, how they're made, what they. Is really the focus of what you should look at and make sure that you don't choose one that weighs your side down. Isn't it funny cuz when you go to load up a plugin, it does tell you compatibility with your theme and when it was most recently updated And if they have a billion.
[00:22:39] Uploads or downloads then it's pretty reputable. Yeah, you definitely go with the masses on this. Definitely. Check the last time it was updated. Absolutely. Look at how many people use it, and those are good indications that the plugin is active. They're still continuing [00:23:00] to make updates to it as WordPress change.
[00:23:03] There could be times when a plugin stops working because of something that is updated in WordPress. So you want to make sure you choose a plugin that is still actively being worked on. And a lot of people use if you choose something that hasn't been downloaded a lot and hasn't been updated in like over six months or a year at least.
[00:23:30] The chances of that plugin becoming a problem in the future are a lot higher because there's not a lot of people using it. And whoever built it, who knows if they're even around or still in the WordPress community. So when WordPress gets updated, if something happens, then you just lose that functionality or it causes your site to.
[00:23:53] And there's no one behind that to be like, Oh, this is a problem with my plugin that I put out there. [00:24:00] I better fix it for everybody. Yeah. Or find find the plugin if you have to replace one. The other thing is this kind of leads us into and back to themes, because themes can slow down a site.
[00:24:13] Because they're like plugins, right? It's a lot of code and functionality. And so do you have any opinions on the better themes to use or builders to use? So I have always, ever since page builders even first came out, have been very negative on installing and using page builders. I've known they were heavy.
[00:24:39] I know they're a lot of code based, like there's a lot of code behind them. People just get so jazzed about, Oh my God, this is what I can do and I can do that. And then Okay, and that's a drag drop. So you're talking like divvy your Elementor. Yeah, those, And so I would highly recommend [00:25:00] everybody who is selecting a new.
[00:25:04] Don't choose a theme that you, that needs Elementor or Beaver Builder or Divvy Or the Muffin Builder. I love the names. I love the names. Muffin Builder. Beaver Builder. Like never heard of Muffin Builder. Muffin Builder. I know. It's so funny. Maybe I just thought it was a joke and never the Beaver Builder's kind of funny too, but most There are a lot of themes out these days that work really well with block plugins.
[00:25:35] So they're basically highly customizable themes where you can change fonts, colors, headers, and footer layouts and things like that. And then the page content is typically just done with the native guten. Block Builder. And then you can extend the block builder functionality by using a plugin that gives you access [00:26:00] to additional blocks.
[00:26:02] And by doing it that way, you're just using native WordPress and a plugin that gives you extra block functionality. A lot of block plugins pair with themes. Okay So if you're using say As, But theme Astra, I think has their block builder, which is called Spectrum Spectra. Okay. Yeah. I think I've heard of Cadence theme uses Cadence blocks.
[00:26:33] That's my go-to. And there's a handful of other, And you used to use something before you used to use Genesis, right? I built all of my themes using Genesis for, I don't know, like probably eight years at. What made you switch? The functionality and the customization of cadence to me, gave [00:27:00] me a lot more option to build sites quicker for people.
[00:27:06] Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. We like the Cadence team. We've had you build a couple sites and it's been they're fast. So here's the thing though, People get if I wanna build my own website, and I definitely wanna use WordPress as a business owner. But I don't know. How to make the right choice about picking a theme and different people recommend different things.
[00:27:27] Can you recommend what to do in that case? Do I go to what theme forest and just buy a theme I like? Or should I talk to a developer or go to WordPress maybe. I guess it really depends on what your level of interest in doing it yourself or having someone help you would be theme forest and getting a theme there that's like already done and you just install it and then start adding your content is great for complete.
[00:27:58] Do it yourself. [00:28:00] You can also use these highly customizable themes like Cadence and Astra and generate press to do the exact same thing, but there is a lot more customization that you need to figure out. It's not here's a theme and this is the look. It's here's a theme and now make it look how you want to make it.
[00:28:22] And you need to know how to go through all of these settings to customize and make that look happen. Lot of settings like you can if you really want to spend the time to do it, but instead, you can get that theme also and have someone like me or another WordPress person go through and basically set it up how you want your site.
[00:28:47] And in that sense, you also would have to have a loose idea of what you want the site to look like so that you can go through that process and put that look together. And then there's the people who [00:29:00] don't want to have anything to do with the build and have a large budget and just want to do a complete custom design and custom build of a site where they're not doing anything, they're just using a developer.
[00:29:13] Build what they need for their side. I think you go through different stages unless you wanna get into development, which is as a business owner with no money. You're building your own and then once you get enough money, you end up start talking to professionals that know where all the buttons and levers are.
[00:29:31] It just makes things easier. That's what I've learned. That's what I've learned. We are out of time. That was really good. Next week we are talking about Looker Studio, which used to be called Data Studio, which is one of our measurement tools. FA and I will be on, and that should be a really fun one. We will see you.
[00:29:48] Bye bye everyone.
[00:29:50] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks. Join us at facebook.com/groups/cyberpunk geeks [00:30:00] to ask your questions, meet new friends, and learn even more about search, social and websites.
