Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Reminder, JPGs are for photos

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Please remember when saving images to upload to the web – photos should be saved as JPGs.

PNG is another popular format for the web but it works best on images like logos, with large blocks of the same colour.

Anything like a photograph that is made up of 1000s of different colours will always be best as a JPG – and usually about one 10th the filesize.

Of the clients that ask me to speed up their WordPress websites (in addition to their SEO work) perhaps the most improvement comes from simply converting their photos they’ve saved as PNGs into JPGs. If a site has several photos that are saved as the wrong file type it’s easy to shave several megabytes off the page size, and therefore speed up the site’s loading time.

Part of the problem is a lot of software for editing images will default to PNG when you use their “Save for web” function. Which is fine for icons and logos, charts and even text saved as an image.

So many websites these days focus on really high quality imagery (understandably – people love photographs!) but don’t know that not all file types are created equally, they all have different purposes and use cases and those wonderful product shots should always be saved as JPGs.

It’s good to get in the habit of doing this right away – after an image is uploaded into WordPress there’s no simply way to convert it to JPG and change all the references in the code to use the different filename. So try to get it right from the outset!

Mobile speed is very important for SEO

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We’ve known for a long time that how fast your site loads is important for SEO.

Google have increased the importance of your website’s mobile speed when working out where to rank it.

It’s been true for a while that there’s been some small impact on your ranking based on mobile speed (desktop speed has been important for years) but now that’s been ramped up.

The most important metrics they use remain the sort of SEO work I do in the code and the quality of your content – but when those things are being looked after mobile speed is where you should turn your attention.

Unfortunately the automated tests out there tend to be a bit alarmist (I blogged about that recently) but they can still serve as a reminder that there’s nearly always room for improvement.

WordPress certainly has its issues with speed. And most themes are still being built for desktop-first (meaning how it looks on a desktop computer is the primary concern, and then it’s cut down and limited for mobile) when in fact current standards are clear that mobile-first should be the designers focus.

Be aware that although the testing systems are imperfect, and WordPress is very hard to score upwards of 80% with on most systems – the faster your site is the better.

In fact, mobile speed is now more important than desktop speed as a ranking metric for Google.

As a general piece of advice, my favourite tool for testing a site’s overall speed (not mobile specific) is Pingdom.

They give you a list of different servers to choose from; so it’s easier to get a real-world figure for your loading time in seconds – just like your target market will see it. Choose the nearest server to your primary audience, et voila.

(Although none of the online speed testing tools are perfect, Pingdom has a lot of useful features.)

Using WordPress as a static site generator

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My WordPress site is so fast, I’m not even sure I can call it WordPress anymore.

Static site generators are awesome.

They create blindingly fast sites, with very few drawbacks (more on those later).

But I’ve been using WordPress since it was a small blogging platform call b2. I’m used to it, I like it, and already have a swag of sites built on it for myself; not just my clients.

Because I work in SEO speed is really crucial to what I do. I do a lot of caching and optimisation work for people, but wanted to see what would happen if I really pushed the envelope out.

Initially I was keen to make a front-end that pulled data out of a basic WordPress install using JSON. I set up a proof-of-concept successfully, but wasn’t so keen on remaking all my layouts and front-end design from scratch for it. Besides, basic things like the WordPress menu editor, text widgets etc. are something I very much enjoy using.

I did some research, and came across a plugin called WP2Static. It’s a slick plugin that basically does just what I wanted – it packages up WordPress sites as static sites you can deploy anywhere. With a bit of configuring you can actually use it to output to a folder on the same server, and use some basic .htaccess rules so that becomes the public facing side of things.

Which is cool, but I wanted to go for MAXIMUM SPEED. My end goal was to get the site hosted on GitHub Pages, and then use Cloudflare to CDN it around the world.

(WP2Static does actually have a system to deploy to GitHub Pages built-in, but I found the deployment process just too slow.)

So when I considered everything I was trying to achieve, which included keeping the live site on the same URL it was already on, I opted to do the following:

  • move the WordPress install of my site off its current server, onto my localhost machine (it’s fast and I back it up regularly)
  • use WP2Static to output the site to a local folder
  • use git via the terminal to publish the site

In theory, for a nerd, it seems fairly straightforward. And on the whole it worked much more easily than I anticipated. The main glitches to overcome were that a number of font files weren’t being picked up by the plugin for inclusion in the static site. But it has a configuration option to force it to include certain file paths, so that was easily overcome.

I did need to create a manual 404.html page (GitHub Pages looks for that in the top directory of a site) but that’s neither here nor there.

There were a few other tiny things that were really specific to my own WordPress setup – like realising my sitemap.xml file needed to be a flat XML file rather than an index linking to other XML files – because they weren’t going to be wrapped up by the plugin.

The thing you really lose with any static site system though is (logically) user interaction. In my case that was just forms, but I was happy to replace my contact form with a simple email address – anything else I might need in the future I can do by embedding forms directly from another system like Google Forms.

I used to sell a couple of SEO packages directly through my site, but Woocommerce was always overkill for that anyway. In the future I’ll just use a combination of Paypal buttons to replicate the same functionality – and in fact it’ll be simpler for the end user because I don’t need to know all their billing address information to start an SEO job with them.

The really big day-to-day drawback is that clicking ‘Publish’ in WordPress doesn’t publish anything anymore. The process to run a new export with WP2Static and then send it to GitHub Pages takes about two minutes. But considering how often I blog or change anything on the site that’s not a major issue. Like with anything, you need to weigh up the processes, pros and cons against how you actually use something to determine if it’s right for you.

The site I did all this too, fyi, is the one you’re on right now. This is a static site, hosted for free on GitHub Pages and replicated on servers around the world using Cloudflare.

Google PageSpeed Insights gives a 99% speed rating for Desktop. And the missing 1% is simply because I include an external file that I can’t set an expiration header for – ironically that file is the script for Google Analytics.

Pingdom (my preferred speed testing system, because you can choose a server location for the real-world load-time to be tested against – so if your clients are predominantly in London then choose that server to get an idea of the speed as they’ll see it) gives the homepage a 0.212 second loading time. For something ultimately based on WordPress as a content management system, that’s impressive.

Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights

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Google PageSpeed Insights has become a tad problematic of late.

Firstly, Google PageSpeed is just a list of code changes that might improve your website’s speed. In most cases trying to do everything they list would simple break a WordPress website – it’s usually a matter of having to try lots or permutations of speed settings to see which scores best. So for example with a lot of themes if you minify javascript and defer scripts it it’ll break things, so we have to choose between those.

It’s also true that when Google actually uses speed as a metric for your SEO ranking, they’re looking at the actual load time for the site as opposed to how it measures on the PageSpeed metric.

To give you an idea of why the % scores aren’t a great measure, let’s consider browser caching. We can’t change whether other domains have it or not. So if you reference any other scripts in your site, for example Facebook, we can’t affect that. And you’ll still fail for the ‘browser caching’ section – even though it might already be applied to all your own scripts.

It’s a great irony of PageSpeed that having Google Analytics installed on a site always costs it a few % points, for the same reason. You’d think Google could do better with their own systems.

Google also changed the way they display results recently and it’s made their reports far less useful for the majority of sites out there. They recommend you ‘Serve images in next-gen formats’, even though there’s a lack of cross-browser compatibility for them. (Yes, you can set things up with a fall back so if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support JPG 2000 it will show another image instead – but as yet this isn’t something you’ll find commonly in WordPress themes. In fact I’m not sure it’s in any.)

So suddenly this testing tool is giving biased advice – guess which browser has full compatibility with next generation image formats? Google Chrome.

Like most Google reporting, PageSpeed does give a good idea of possible things to investigate but it’s not worth getting so hung up on you stop focusing on your content creation.

Moving email between servers

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There are plenty of reason to move servers for your website, but email is often an afterthought. Even though it’s something we use hundreds of times a week.

Speed issues, cost and possibly (hopefully) needing to upgrade to cope with all your traffic are all excellent reasons to consider a server move.

Moving the website is one thing, files, databases and DNS work all need to be done – but what about all your emails? Inbox, folder, sent items, drafts. How do you get those across?

And if you’re a server admin with full control over them, then this post isn’t for you. Because you have some clear pathways to move email from the old server to the new one.

But what about everyone else? The 99% of people who just pay for shared space with an existing hosting company, who just have a web based control panel (like Plesk or cPanel) they log into?

If that’s you, prepare for pain. Well, to varying degrees.

Simply put there’s never been a decent tool made to move email from server to server.

If you connect to your email currently via POP, that will mean you’re downloading your email to you local computer and therefore have a local copy. So losing the email from the existing server wouldn’t be a problem.

If you connect via IMAP (and most people do) then all your email is stored on the server, and would be lost. In this case you have 3 courses of action*:

  1. Be prepared to lose your existing email.
  2. Change it so you do connect via POP, then have all that email download to your local machine. The downside with this is usually you’d only end up with the emails on one machine. If you’re used to checking the same email accounts via perhaps two computers and a mobile, then you’d lose the option to have old emails on those.
  3. Get the new server setup and running. Set up the new email address (using IMAP too) and get those all setup on your computer. Then connect to the old email accounts again (you’ll need to change the server address to the IP address, which is a tad cumbersome). But then the really awful bit comes in, you have to drag the emails from the old accounts to the new – and because they’re set up on your local machine it downloads them all then uploads them as it copies them across. Sometimes I can copy a folder at a time, sometimes you need to do emails one at a time – it depends on the setup of the old server.

That last one is a horrible job. I’ve done it on request before, but for an average small office email setup it can easily take a day.

My preference is to start again. Suck up that there’s going to be email lost, make sure you have copies of any current message threads and communication, and bite the bullet.

 

* = If you’re moving from one type of hosting control panel to another one that’s the same (for example cPanel to cPanel) – you have another option fortunately. Again it’s messy: you need to download your mail folder then recreate all the same email accounts on the new server and upload the mail folder to the same place on that new server. This often falls down though because of permissions issues, or server settings you can’t control (where mail is stored, etc.)

 

Sale now on

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I am offering (for a very limited time) two for the price of three deals on some of my services, including WordPress SEO and WordPress speed.

Interested? Drop me a line.

A few details about the services on offer:
https://petermahoney.net/wordpress-seo/
https://petermahoney.net/wordpress-speed/

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

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