WordPress Archives - Technical SEO

2015 Jul 28

Help! Googlebot Cannot Access CSS And JS files On My WordPress Site!

By Christopher 0 Comments Google, SEO, WordPress

If you received this message this morning from Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), you’re not alone. Google has recently been pushing harder for webmasters to allow crawlers full access to all Javascript and CSS so that they can render a site to determine whether or not it meets mobile standards (among other things). Many WordPress sites (along with the other major CMSs) received an ominous warning that their site was blocking assets, and it could affect rankings. While technically true, many of the sites were only blocking /wp-admin/, where absolutely no public-facing assets should live. For those of you that are in that situation, relax.

2015 Jul 24

WooCommerce HTTPS Fix For Chrome

By Christopher 0 Comments WooCommerce, WordPress

In response to the Chrome 44 issue that’s been plaguing some sites, someone was kind enough to roll the fix into a plugin for folks who may not want to poke around their woocommerce.php file.

2015 Feb 05

WordPress Theme Bloat: Premium Themes and Layout Builders

By Christopher 0 Comments Speed, Themes, Web Development, WordPress

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

Inspired by a thread on Reddit, let’s look at one of the main complaints about WordPress these days: bloated installations that run slow.

One of WordPress’s greatest strengths is the fact that anyone can purchase or download a premade theme and have a “custom” website up in a short span of time. It’s also one of the things that can cause the most headache for more experienced users. Many theme developers are obsessed with cramming as much functionality into a theme as possible in order to attract the greatest number of potential users. The byproduct of that is a theme that causes the site to load slowly, causes conflicts with plugins, or is simply difficult to arrange the content the way you want.

2015 Feb 02

WordPress Security: 4 Easy Things You Can Do To Avoid Disaster

By Christopher 0 Comments Security, WordPress

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

If you have a WordPress site, eventually you’ll become the target of a hacking attack. Whether it’s brute force, SQL injection, or something even more sinister, no one is safe. However, you don’t have to end up becoming a casualty as well. We’ve recovered more sites from attacks than we care to count, and more often than not, the initial intrusion was 100% preventable. It’s time to stop being lazy, and start being proactive about WordPress security! We’ve compiled a list of three things you need to do right now to help prevent becoming the next on the list of victims.

2014 Sep 04

Adding Wistia as an oEmbed Provider in WordPress 4.0 & WordPress 4.1

By Christopher 7 Comments Code Snippets, WordPress

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

With today’s WordPress 4.0 sendout, embedding content from other sites just got way easier. While there is a pretty large list of oEmbed providers, a very important one for us SEOs was left out: Wistia. Don’t worry, though. There is a way to make Wistia videos work the same was with a simple paste of the video URL, much like a YouTube video works.

In your theme’s functions.php, paste the following code:

wp_oembed_add_provider( '/https?://(.+)?(wistia.com|wi.st)/.*/', 'https://fast.wistia.com/oembed', true );

2011 Mar 05

Top 3 WordPress SEO Tips For 2011

By Christopher 0 Comments SEO, Themes, WordPress

WordPress is an excellent CMS for building easily edited and updated websites. It also has a well-structured architecture that performs reasonably well and is mostly well-optimized for search engines. However, depending on your use of WordPress, there are a few tips to keep in mind when building your WordPress website.

Well Written Content

Without decent content on a page, getting a page to rank organically is an extremely tough and often fruitless endeavor. Simply stuffing keywords has been proven countless times to cause a page to perform very poorly, and provides no real value to a human who finds your page. The best rule of thumb is to write for people first, and fill their need before considering any SEO implications.