Tips Tuesday – Core Web Vitals, Video SEO Booster, Better Hosting

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• The new Video SEO Booster course is live – by private invitation for now
• New boutique hosting is going live this week
• Site Audit Client Perks and TOS has been sent
• Why you may not want to go it alone for Core Web Vitals fixes
• How you may be fixing the wrong things for better speed
• Why not to throw out the Genesis baby with the bath water
• Update on theme testing
• The new Core Web Vitals fixes we’ve found
• The huge number of sites that are not optimized for Core Web Vitals yet
• Why Google needs to get the log out of its own eye for speed
• More info about Full Site Editing that’s coming in WP 5.8
• Mailchimp introduces new Stores and Appointments features
• What I found interesting in the April Genesis Shapers meeting notes for speed
• Why you should keep posting to social sites that never send you direct traffic

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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. So come join us live for the party.

Replay

Who I Help

All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes.

BlogAid Happenings

May the Fourth be with you!

Boy, do I ever have exciting news for you this week!!

Video SEO Booster Course is LIVE

I’m thrilled to share with you that the Video SEO Booster course is now live!

My video tester helpers are in it by special invitation and taking the course as we speak.

There are 36 tutorials in there now and 3 more on the way.

We still have the recipe video testing and tutorials to make, and a few more examples on adding video to the how-to blocks – both of which have extra schema markup.

But I wanted to get the course launched so that they can give me their feedback and I can make any tweaks needed before doing a private launch to my full BB Hub members, and then later to BlogAid News subscribers, and then to the general public.

So, it’s a staged release with various discount levels.

I’m beyond thrilled to make this course available to you, as video is hot, hot, hot right now and Google is promoting it like crazy.

And that means that video SEO counts more now than ever before too.

For members of other courses on the BlogAid Learning Center, your Member Dashboard looks a little different now too. I just updated the look using Gutenberg, so you now have buttons instead of graphics to click for getting to your courses.

Boutique Hosting Going Live

I’m also thrilled to share with you that the new boutique hosting will be going live in a few days!

We already have our first site owners lined up to move into the special HOA hosting section.

That will be a corded off area on the hosting which will only have my clients who have had their site audits and have demonstrated that they are serious about keeping their site current by having at least one audit checkup. We have that thing locked down for security at a higher level too.

Once we get those folks in then we’ll be opening up the public side of the hosting for all site audit clients, including new ones, or those who have had just their first audit.

Plus, the host has my exact process for doing the migration service, which includes pre-checks prior to the move, the move itself, all security changes, and deleting everything at the old host. You are NOT going to get that from any other host!!!!!!

That means you will get the same high level of service you get from me, and there will be zero waiting, as you will not have to be on my wait list for your migration either.

Now, for those who are doing the migration/audit combo, you are still on my waitlist, as I have to do the audit in conjunction with the migration. But, I’m training a new super tech to start helping with those too.

I’ll have more details for you on all of this when the public side of the new hosting opens up.

Site Audit Client Perks and TOS Sent

I’m also thrilled to share that the new Site Audit Client Perks and Terms of Service doc has been sent to all site audit clients!!

Because everything with sites, plugins, themes, hosting, security, and more is changing so rapidly now, it’s critically important that you keep all these elements current.

That’s also why it’s so important to read Tips Tuesday every week and get an audit checkup annually too.

I literally can’t support site owners who do not have their sites up to speed with these changes, as the advice I’m giving assumes that your site is current. Otherwise, there could be conflicts or breaks.

For that reason, I created a Terms of Service that states that site audit clients get all perks immediately, like: 

• free access to a private member area with extra info and tutorials that I don’t release to the public
• free access to our private Facebook group for support with all things related to running your site and online business, including the new mastermind groups coming this summer
• access to the HOA section of the new boutique hosting
• qualifying for an audit checkup that is done by the hour and I update things as I go, which makes it super cheap and fast

If site owners choose not to keep their sites current, then they will lose access to these perks.

As the messaging all over BlogAid and at the top of this post/podcast states, I help business-minded, hands-on site owners who are serious about making money and who want to keep up with the changes.

And this new TOS simply backs up that statement. 

Site Services Update

We’re still holding around July-ish for the wait list. I’ve been onboarding clients like crazy lately because so many of them are audit checkups and those are fast and cheap. And that is offsetting all of the new requests I get every week too. So, we’re not getting any sooner for projects, but we’re not getting much longer either for now.

But that will change later this month, as so many new clients have contacted me, and those are full audits, and they usually require more work too, which takes longer.

So, if you’re thinking about a site audit, now is the time to get in so we can start working on your project before the new Google Page Experience, including Core Web Vitals, goes into full effect.

Don’t Go It Alone First

I’ve also updated my audit intake forms to not only ask if another tech has already worked on your site, but to also ask if you have done any speed work on your site too.

Folks, I help my clients get it right the first time.

And it’s already hard enough to chase down Core Web Vitals issues without also having to do a bug hunt for what another tech or the site owner might have already done.

So, I’m not taking all of the jobs that come in unless they are willing to have all the work they were dissatisfied with taken out first, depending on who did the work, and/or to provide full documentation of what was done.

The liability to me is just too high otherwise, and I’m literally deciding on a case-by-case basis.

This is also true for my webmaster designers who have been helping with chasing down all of the CWV issues as they relate to theme code changes too. Those are even harder to chase down if the site owner has done any undocumented tinkering beforehand as well.

You May Be Fixing The Wrong Things

Here’s another example of why you may not want to try this on your own.

Last month I had a site audit client who was using the GeneratePress theme. The initial speed tests showed super poor Core Web Vitals.

But we didn’t chase those down. 

Instead, we got rid of all the junk that was flagged in the audit, including a bloated database and got rid of about half the plugins, among other things.

When we ran the tests again after all those fixes, the site was super fast and we had not even applied the speed tweaks yet.

We followed the data and fixed all of the issues in an orderly fashion, including all of the stuff on the host side that you can’t see on the site or in the speed testers.

Dealing with that stuff is what brought most of the speed up.

So, if you think you want to try these fixes yourself, be sure to document all of your changes.

Plus, running the same URL through the same tester will give you bogus results, as the testers cache that URL and you may not even be seeing the changes you made correctly.

Better to come get a site audit and see all of the speed drags everywhere and get them all fixed.

There are all kinds of posts and guides out there now with generic suggestions on how to fix CWV issues. And blogger groups are giving all manner of crappy and downright bogus suggestions too.

Unless you have nearly zero issues to begin with, it’s not likely you’ll be able to find and fix the issues. 

And wild guesses may do your site more harm than good, or do super expensive things that don’t even help, like moving hosts or changing themes, only to discover neither of those were the issue.

Folks, if you’re trying to save money, and you think hiring a pro is expensive, just wait until you hire an amateur- and that includes yourself.

Don’t throw out the Genesis baby with the bath water

I know many of you are wanting to change themes right now.

And you’re dumping Genesis.

Keep in mind that the Genesis framework is fast. 

It’s your bloated child theme that is slowing down your site. 

So, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater to just jump to another framework – some of the child themes designed for it could be bloated and slow too.

Theme Testing Update

The theme team met live last week and we got a good look at the backside of the Kadence theme as well.

Everyone was stunned at how closely it mirrored the backside of Astra! We’re kind of wondering who stole ideas from whom with it – hahaha.

We have also decided on what will be included in the theme build outs so that I can get started with formal testing and all sites will be exactly the same.

The designers are each working on the theme they chose and I’ll be spinning up the test sites to get baselines as soon as they are done.

More Core Web Vitals Fixes Found

Me and my top 2 designers continue to find more fixes for CWV across multiple themes and setups.

The latest one involves some settings in the caching/optimization plugins we use and how those interact with the theme when delivered over the HTTP/2 protocol.

All of the online testers we use are now testing on HTTP/2, which allows more requests to be sent and received in parallel. And they are showing us that we need to do our optimization settings a little differently with regard to JS and CSS.

I’m also chasing down some issues with how they show us lazy load of images acting. We’re using the Chrome browser in all of the testers and if the JS for our plugin’s lazy load is not processed in time, then the browser does the lazy loading, and we get mixed results.

Request order matters like crazy, and each theme is going to have different set of requests and they will come out in a different order.

So, this is no small task to figure out what order is working or goofing things up, but we are getting there – in spite of the testers also changing how they calculate and display results too – and despite theme frameworks fixing these same issues all along the way too. 

One of my designers was chasing her tail trying to find the cause of the issue in the theme and then the next minor theme release update fixed it in the framework.

This is also why it is so super important for us to do these head-to-head theme tests on sites that are all loaded the same way with design, plugins, and content and images.

We need to be able to document load order of everything, and then throw optimization at it to see what changes.

And we need to see how the theme frameworks change too.

That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

Speed Tips

Most Sites Aren’t Optimized for CWV Yet

I read an article from Search Engine Journal last week of a company that tested 2 million top websites and only 4% of them were optimized for Core Web Vitals.

This is just one of the reasons Google delayed the roll out until mid July – they have to give everyone time to square out not only their theme, but the plugins, and even the testers so we can see what is going on for real.

Even then, Google said that CWV as a ranking factor won’t go into full effect until sometime in August. And I’m betting they are going to push that back.

Google Needs to Get the Log Out of Their Own Eye

On top of it, more and more devs and techs and SEOs are griping loudly that Google’s own stuff is a big cause of slow page load.

They cite things like:

• Embedded YouTube videos
• Embedded Google Maps
• Google fonts
• And even Google analytics tag manager

And I’ve seen plenty of test results from techs of Google’s own sites not meeting CWV parameters too.

So, it’s become a running joke of do as I say, not as I do.

I hope all this does put some pressure on Google to get their own house in order, especially with their own products that we use on our sites.

WordPress Tips

Curious About Full Site Editing?

Right this minute, Gutenberg is only a content editor that replaced blocks for the TinyMCE editor we used in WP.

But, that’s not the whole Gutenberg story.

Phase 2 of Gutenberg has been in development for the last 2 years to bring block editing and styling to the entire theme. That’s a huge task.

It’s called Full Site Editing and it replaces widgets, headers, and footers with blocks.

Doing so also requires theme support, meaning that your theme has to be Full Site Editing compliant. 

In July, a big chunk of the underlying code to make Full Site Editing happen will be rolling in with WordPress 5.8.

They say it will be an MVP – Minimally Viable Product.

But, that only applies to devs, not us site owners.

It will have enough base code in the core for devs and designers to start building Full Site Editing compliant themes.

I don’t expect them to be fully viable for us to consider using until at least mid 2022.

Even if the themes become available, I don’t expect plugin devs who make things with widgets to suddenly start making those functions available as blocks until late 2022 or into 2023.

So, if you’re in the market for a new theme, you can confidently use frameworks and plugins that are on the market now and they will continue to be supported for at least 4-5 years to come.

If you want to know more about what Full Site Editing is, see the post I have linked for you from WP itself.

And see this post from Gutenberg Times about what’s coming for themes this year too.

And this one with a video of Full Site Editing overview as well.

E-comm Tips

New Mailchimp Stores and Appointments

I want to thank fellow webmaster Larry Snow for sharing this exciting news!!

MailChimp just announced free storefront and appointment setting tools.

Here’s what they said:

“At a high level, our Stores product will enable merchants to create an online storefront, add and edit products, process orders, and configure payments, tax, and shipping. Our Appointments product will allow businesses to offer services bookings online and manage their schedule.”

In our BB Hub masterminds coming this summer, how to do e-commerce to sell your own products is a topic that we’ll be discussing.

And I think this MailChimp storefront will definitely be something to consider as a viable option.

It rolled out in Beta on April 28, so we are keeping an eye on it and testing to see what options it has and how easy it is to set up.

And ease of setup and use is a big deal, as I’ve always thought that MC had a goofy interface. We’ll see what they do with this thing.

Theme Tips

Genesis Shapers April Meeting Notes

While reading through the meeting notes of the most recent Genesis Shapers chat for April, I found their followup remarks about Core Web Vitals testing to be super interesting.

You may recall about a month ago that I reported the very theme testing that me and my team are doing led to some overdue changes with the Genesis framework core coding to help meet CWV metrics.

And in further testing, they are now saying that WP Rocket’s Critical CSS Generation tool is not always picking up everything needed to fully optimize load either.

That is akin to issues we are finding in other caching/optimization combo plugins, but with how they are treating JS (JavaScript) optimization.

READ: Caching vs Optimization for Site Speed to see how each of these functions make your site faster, and why we use combo plugins that do both.

They also discussed the lag time between Genesis framework updates to fix CWV or other issues and 3rd party child theme updates with those changes included in them.

That is a huge issue, in my opinion.

In fact, there are some child theme designers who have you wait a month or more after a new WP release comes out before they declare it safe to update. That’s nuts, to me, especially considering that WP makes the final Release Candidate available for testing about a month prior to the public update release.

So, if you are thinking about a theme change, please do consider staying with Genesis, but getting the heck away from this kind of 3rd party child theme designer who is not keeping up, or who has code so specialized that there is a threat of breakage with every WP update.

SEO Tips

Why Social Shares That Refer Almost No Traffic Are Useful

Have you ever thought about dumping the act of posting on social platforms that never seem to send any traffic to your site?

Well, don’t do that just yet.

Instead, go read this post from the nice folks at Blogging Wizard about how those social shares are actually quite useful.

And if you’re wondering why I put this topic in the SEO Tips section, that should give you a clue why you want to keep posting to Twitter and other platforms, even if you never see a single person visit your site from them.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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