My experience with StudioPress’s Genesis Framework wasn’t really that worth it until one of my sites got about 300 visitors when the day before that it only received 100-200 visits. I started to wonder why this happened by looking for new Google Updates. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any at that time but I found a post by Yoast about how some themes can hurt your SEO. That got me to worry because I didn’t really check or go through some process to see if my theme, which is a Genesis child theme at that time, could bring my blog down or not. With a little help from few friends, I finally solved it and here I’m explaining to you why the Genesis Framework is super search engine friendly.
Category Archives: WordPress
The Importance of Having Related Posts in WordPress
Often you visit a website and at the end of the article there is a list of related posts or sometimes you can already see it right on top of the page & also the bottom too. Its purpose is to help you explore more contents on that website instead of leaving after reading just the first post. See! that could be a great strategy everyone should use right now if you haven’t done so. But that’s not it, we still have more for you. And if you are all set to boom the traffic at your website, without having headaches while putting codes for WordPress related posts, then you are at perfect place to know about WordPress related posts plugins. Whose sole part is to keep visitors engaged in reading the stuff at your website.
Which WordPress Plugins are Slowing Down your Website?
Have you ever heard of the term “Less is More”? This is one of my favorite terms that I always applied to web designing and my own blog, especially when it’s running on the WordPress platform. The reason behind that is having only one or two main plugins will help my website run way faster without doing optimization.
Before building a website, it must be a priority that it has to be fast loading and not cracking up on different devices. In order to do this, it must be noted that the major reason slowing down a WordPress website are always the two: the Web Hosting and the bad plugins. It is because the when your web hosting server is not properly configured it will damage the loading speed of the pages of your WordPress website and then comes the few plugins which are poorly coded resulting in hurting the speed of WordPress websites to give you pain! I am sure the question of a lot people is answered here that do plugins slow down WordPress site? Yes, they can down the WordPress site for you despite of making them happening.
However, not a lot of people understand that and they just keep on installing as many plugins as they can without knowing that it will slow down their site and also takes up too many resources from the hosting provider.
So what type of WordPress plugins are there and are really slow WordPress plugins? Should we use them or not?
You’re about to find out the answers really quickly by reading the rest of this article.
What kind of plugins uses the most server resources?
Related Posts Plugins
This is the type of plugin everyone must use to increase internal links/pageviews and reduce bounce rate. But they didn’t know about the fact that it wasted a lot of their hosting resources. Let’s use “Yet Another Related Post” as an example, before this plugin can display relevant posts, it must go through a bunch of queries sent to the database. What could be a good solution? I suggest that you have custom related posts without plugin or use one like OutBrain or nRelated because it doesn’t consume your data.
Backup Plugins
You must be surprised to see this kind of plugin appeared under the list, I’m pretty sad too. These WordPress backup plugins usually have only one important task, compressed all website data into a .zip file and send it to the host. As far as I know, the size could easily go up to hundreds of megabytes (MB).
What should you do? The current best solution to back up a WordPress site is to use VaultPress.
Hit Counters Plugin
I don’t get how nowadays people are still using those classic hit counters on their site. I’m not talking about the “Who’s Among Us” but plugins that count post views and online visitors. Don’t they know about Google Analytics? Just imagine you have 10k visits a day – it will execute code counter 10,000 times. That’s crazy, right?
Other
Even must-have plugins such as Broken Link Checker, Google XML Sitemaps, SEO Auto Links, etc are the ones that eats most of your database.
Solution?
Above are a few types of plugins that I know will directly impact your site. To manually find out which plugins are affecting your site, please use P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to receive a detailed report of each plugin load time.
This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time. Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site.
How to add Twitter Cards for WordPress
There are plenty of ways to marketing the Twitter account and its tweets, this means using social media analytic tools, spread the words around, and also adding Twitter Cards to your WordPress blog. This feature is very similar to Facebook status whenever someone posted a link to another website.
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How to implement SEO with MaxCDN
I have heard of the term CDN or content delivery network for a long time now and have seen many websites using it, however, I thought that it was complicated to set up after reading several articles online. So I didn’t use any CDN solution up until the beginning of last month. Sounds super crazy, isn’t it? I mean you don’t necessarily need CDN to speed up your WordPress or website. As long as its site is running on some of the best hosting company then you’re good. But it wouldn’t hurt to do some optimizations right?
So I finally set up an account at MaxCDN and got it to work with WordPress in just a few minutes. Several days went by and I notice something changed, Google has stopped indexing images on my blog. Did some searching on Google and landed on one of Brian Jackson’s site called OkayMarketing. I got in touch with him on Twitter and find out that we were facing the same issue. Brian was kind enough to walk me through this and I got Google to start indexing my images again.
From this, I also learned that people might not get this error but another one where MaxCDN will cause duplicate content because your files are now being hosted on two different URLs. In this article, I will show you how to resolve these problems in the same way.
Let’s go ahead and login into your MaxCDN control panel. Go to the SEO settings of your pull zone and enable both Canonical Header & Robots.txt. Inside the robot.txt box, you should have something like this. If not, just copy what I have below and paste it into there.
User-agent: *
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /
The last step would be changing the image path in your Sitemap file. The majority of us now use Yoast SEO plugin so add this code below in your current theme’s functions.php file.
functionwpseo_cdn_filter( $uri) {returnstr_replace( ‘http://yourdomain.com’, ‘http://cdn.yourdomain.com’, $uri);}add_filter( ‘wpseo_xml_sitemap_img_src’, ‘wpseo_cdn_filter’);
Don’t forget to change yourdomain.com to your WordPress address and CDN URL. Do a quick cache in W3 Total Cache or any plugin that you have. Wait for a day or two and everything should go back to its normal mode. Let me know if you have questions.