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You are here: Home / Archives for WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO

How To Speed Up WordPress on Your Website the Easy Way

Filed Under: WordPress SEO, WordPress Setup June 29, 2013

Sooner or later every WordPress blog or website owner wants to know how to speed up WordPress. A well performing website is good for users and for  search engine rankings. So lets look at what you can do about it.

The more you post on your WordPress website the bigger your database grows. And the more plugins you install and uninstall your database gets bloated with uncleared settings from previous plugins. What can you do about that and what other measures can you take to get that initial install speed back into your site?

Initial Actions to Speed Up WordPress

First of all you need to take three actions on your files and database:

  • backup,
  • backup,
  • and BACKUP

Why this emphasis on creating a backup of your website and especially the database? Because you are going to work on that database.  Don't worry, you don't need to learn MySql statements and queries (although some basic knowledge can help). You can do most of the work with plugins.

So, did you create a good backup and test it or at least check that it is done? You can create a backup via your providers CPanel or request it via a ticket if you don't know how to do it yourself.

After your backup verification you need to make sure you get a good baseline to measure improvements. First run a page check on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. Your final goal should be to reach a score of at least 90/100.

Two Easy Plugins to Start

With the latest versions of WordPress you are filling your WordPress database with many revisions of your posts and pages if you go back into them and edit the content. These revisions  are rarely used and you can clean them out and prevent them from being created in the future and thereby reduce the number of revisions stored.

Revision Control is the first plugin you can install and you can change the settings to suit your needs.

WordPress Revision Coltrol settings

Now that you have revisions under control you need to clean out the old revisions and with the next plugin you can do several things in one click.

WP-Optimize gives you the options to clean:

  • all post revisions
  • all auto draft posts
  • marked spam comments
  • unapproved comments
  • and optimize your database tables

wordpress optimize options

Just select your choices and click PROCESS to clean and optimize. In the configuration screen you will have a large overview of the tables in your database and it shows you if they need optimization or not.

Getting Closer to Your Turbo Options

There is a great plugin called Clean Options that can help you to find and eliminate old entries left by plugins you no longer use. This looks pretty easy but you must have some knowledge of which plugins you used before and which plugins you removed.

If you follow the instructions of this plugins documentation you will see a large list of fields that might be no longer in use, but please be careful and if you are unsure about one or more of them, don't clean them out.

What you can look for are descriptions that are clearly related to old plugins. In my case these were entries like wp_insert and whydowork_.You might recognize others from plugins you stopped using.

Clean Options Table Results example

Cleaning your images and reducing their size with Smush It.

Smush It is a plugin that reduces image file sizes and improves performance. It is simple to use and is easy to configure. .

Do I use it myself? Sometimes I do, especially if I am working on websites other than my own. I prepare all my images before hand by optimizing and, if necessary, resizing them via Irfanview.

Using a WordPress Cache Plugin

I have tried several caching plugins on my WordPress websites and the one that out performs the others for me is W3 Total Cache, but it requires the right configuration.

For your understanding, a cache plugin takes the result of a post request and stores it on a disc as static HTML. If the next visitor to your website requests the same page this cached version is shown. W3 Total Cache uses a mechanism for the temporary storage of your web documents to increase performance and ultimately speed up WordPress. The cache itself is cleared after some time (you can set that time in the configuration).

Installing W3 Cache is easy. Just install it like any other plugin by searching for the W3 Cache plugin from the back end.

The next steps are to configure it. If you get any warnings on these settings start by checking if your .htaccess file is writable during this configuration session.

The first action is to disable the preview option.

Disable W3 Total Cache Preview

Next is to enable the settings for:

  • Page Cache
  • Database Cache
  • Browser Cache
  • Under Miscellaneous only check “Verify rewrite rules” and save all settings.

w3 total cache first settings to speed up WordPress

Click on the menu option titled Browser Cache and activate the options as shown below. This is not the standard setting and has a great effect on your site's speed.

W3 Total Cache Browser Page Cache Settings

Save everything, exit out of this screen and then go back into it.

You will see some error messages in the top part of the screen.

w3 total cache errors settings

Click the option auto-install and you will be fine.

Speed Up WordPress Final Check

Ready? Now go and check again on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to see if your scores have improved. Note: Run the test twice because your cache may need to kick in.

If this has no effect, you either already had a good score or you need to look at your theme and plugins, but you will see that on the Pingdom tools page. The final option if nothing else helps is to look for a new hosting (aff) provider.

Below is the ultimate score of 100/100, but you should take that with a big grain of salt as this is a new installation with nothing posted yet, but with all the plugins active I mentioned above.

Top Score for Newly installed website.

So what about your site, did you get better scores or do you have extra options and information that you can share that will speed up WordPress?

Affiliate Link Disclosures

By Herbert-Jan van Dinther Filed Under: WordPress SEO, WordPress Setup Tagged With: Cache, Images, Performance, Speed, wordpress 2 Comments

WordPress 3 SEO – How To Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

Filed Under: WordPress SEO June 29, 2013

WordPress 3 SEO consists of several aspects and this book of Micheal David covers all of those aspects in his book [easyazon-link asin=”1847199003″]WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization[/easyazon-link].

Here is a short breakdown of each chapter:

1. Getting Started: SEO Basics. Good introduction into the On-Page ranking factors that you need to be aware off, good in detailed information that you can use on your website before you get into link building. Using good keyword rich navigation is covered and in chapter 3 keywords are getting more attention, but I would have liked to have more information on the right structure for you websites topics. As said, Chapter 3 covers keywords, but a good website structure example would have been great, either here or in the keyword chapter. Definitely a great start of this book to get into the topic of SEO

2. Customizing WordPress Settings for SEO. This chapter starts by taking a step back and lets you look at the goal of your website, which is not always clear unless you write it down on paper and stick to it! If you look at the first few posts on this site you will see that I was guilty of that sin myself… The rest is about the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress as a platform.

3. Research and Working with Keywords. Keywords, keywords, keywords… for some this chapter will be an eyeopener, for others it will be tough to read, but Keywords are the corner stones of your website and Michael David teaches you how to lay the best possible foundation for your site. If you don't want to read the whole book, don't skip this chapter.

4. Understanding Technical Optimization. Don't be scared for the term Technical is is not about the in depth technical mambo-jumbo that you think. This chapter will tell you how to use the basics of WordPress Title, Meta descriptions, Permalinks structures and Images to get the most of your website. I do suggest you try the alternative WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin instead of All-In-One-SEO and Google XML Sitemaps.

5. Creating Optimized and Engaging Content. Together with the keyword chapter you will learn a lot about what will attract visitors to your website and keep them coming, together with the search engines. Here you get some good information about writing content and how to structure you categories for optimal results. It has a Nice collection of plugins listed that can help your with your categories.

6. Link Building. Short chapter on Link Building which is good for me (I don't do much link building). It is good to see how you can get inbound links, but I feel that Google's PageRank is not a thing that you should focus on. If you want to start with basic link building this will give you some good hints.

7. Using Social Media. Social media is hot now, LinkedIn, Twitter, Social Bookmarking, Facebook and YouTube are all covered in this chapter. I love the Facebook section and how to setup a fan page! And maybe in the next version he can put in an extra section about the new http://www.google.com/+1/button/

8. Avoiding Black Hat Techniques. Hopefully you will never have to use the advice given to undo Google penalties, but it is good to know which things you need to avoid on your website. Here a just a few of them that are covered: Link Exchange, Website Submission Services, Offshore link building (I don't like those emails) Autoblogging.

9. Avoiding SEO Mistakes. There are some things that you have to avoid if you want good rankings in the search engines, read through this chapter ans start your cleanup session, you probably will have some mistakes in place…

10. Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress. Use the tools the search engines offer you, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo!Site Explorer and more. Learn how to use theme, but don't go checking everything every hour. Use your time to write good content and build your site. Set aside a moment per day and an hour per week for analysis.

Appendix A: WordPress SEO Plugins. A WordPress book is not complete if it doesn't have Plugin recommendations. There a definitely a few ones that I will be testing but I do think All-In-One-SEO is no longer the best choice, even in Beta WordPress SEO by Yoast is better (and it will soon be out of Beta)

Appendix B: Other SEO Resources. Very helpful list of websites and forums to get more information and to keep up-to-date with SEO in general.

Conclusion: If you want your WordPress website to get better ranking in the search results, this book covers all the basics and has good advice about content and technical improvements. And you did build your website to get visitors, right? Follow the advice in this book and it will help you to get those visitors.

For me this book will stay on my desk a lot longer than I thought it would.

By Herbert-Jan van Dinther Filed Under: WordPress SEO 7 Comments

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