Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
Core Web Vitals workshop this week in the DIY SEO courseWhat’s in WordPress 5.6.2 that rolled out MondayWhy I’m concerned about lazy load of iframes coming in WP 5.7Why I think WP has no business including any type of lazy loadingHow the statistics of WordPress’ market share are misleadingUpdate on progress with the Video SEO courseUpdate on meeting with designers for theme speed tweaksWhy I’m looking at theme frameworks beyond Astra and Genesis
Listen to the Podcast
Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday
I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. It’s a great way to get the deeper story on what’s reported in Tips Tuesday. And, I almost always have breaking news for the day too. So come join us live for the party.
Replay
Who I Help
All tips, advice, and suggestions in this, and all BlogAid posts and tutorials, are intended to empower business-minded, hands-on bloggers who are serious about making money with their sites and who are on hosts I can work on.
BlogAid Happenings
It’s going to be a super short Tips Tuesday today as there isn’t a lot of site news to share with you. And some weeks that’s a good thing as we can use the break, right?
But I will give you another peek into my crystal ball of what’s coming around the bend for us.
Video SEO course update
I’m still plugging away on the upcoming Video SEO course.
I’m in the slow part of it with gathering screenshots and such for all of the examples.
And if you’re in one of my courses, you know how real-world I make all of the examples.
There are 4 major sections to the course and I’m more than halfway finished with the 2nd section, which is by far the biggest one.
I’ve been doing livestreams to keep my site audit clients, who are our private testers group, updated and their feedback has been so helpful.
I’ll be featuring some of their videos and such as examples in the course too.
Theme Speed Tweaks for Core Web Vitals
This past week I was delighted to meet with my top 2 webmaster designers to go over tests I had taken to help us identify theme issues that are contributing to less than stellar Core Web Vitals metrics.
One of the biggest culprits is the mobile navigation. It will often be loaded as a bullet list of linked text prior to the CSS styling that collapses it down to the little hamburger icon you see when viewing on mobile.
We chatted about ways to mitigate that issue. One is to fix the load order with a good optimization plugin, like WP Fastest Cache premium, which has a combo of caching and optimization.
The other is to fix the load order of the theme, and that’s not as easy as it sounds, especially on older Genesis 3rd party themes that are bloated messes anyway.
So, if you’re in the market this year for a theme revamp, you need a designer who is also a webmaster and understands all about Core Web Vitals and elements in the theme that affect those metrics.
You also need to let that designer choose your new theme base if you want to stick with Genesis. Just forget all about StudioPress themes or getting one from a 3rd party child theme designer.
Looking Beyond Astra and Genesis