Tips Tuesday – Full Site Editing, Ranking Factors, Cloudflare, Kadence Themes

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Ranking Factors Part 1 Workshop on Thursday
• Video embed speed case study is complete, and I have the fastest way to do
• What I found when testing the Yoast Video SEO plugin’s new speed feature
• Video schema markup testing is complete
• Update on the new boutique hosting for us
• Why the order of my site services wait list may flip
• The new TOS for site audit client perks I’m drawing up, and why
• Why you must get your site checkup every year now
• More on the new mastermind groups coming this summer
• How WP Fastest Cache and Cloudflare work together
• What Google’s calculation change to Cumulative Layout Shift means for your site
• What’s in the email Cloudflare sent out about IP changes
• Why I’m excited about Cloudflare’s revamped Web Application Firewall
• Update on Cloudflare’s new Super Bot Fight Mode and why we won’t be using it
• Why I’m looking into blocking some bots manually
• The new Rate Limit function I’m looking into at Cloudflare
• Why I’m not happy about iThemes acquiring Kadence Themes
• Will Full Site Editing be rolling into WP 5.8?
• The big split in Gutenberg and Classic we have now and why a bigger split is on the way
• What to do if a theme revamp project is on your horizon
• Why you need to jump on the Gutenberg train right now

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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

It’s been a butt-in-seat, get-it-done-no-matter-what kind of week around here!!! And, more changes are coming to BlogAid, including to the perks for site audit clients.

Ranking Factors Workshop this week

We have an important workshop coming this Thursday in the DIY SEO course.

Ranking Factors have changed considerably since last year.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Core Web Vitals hitting in May.

There’s more to those ranking factors than just speed, though.

Google is also looking hard into Accessibility compliance as well as UX (User Experience).

After adding all of the new material into this workshop, I thought it would be best to split it into 2 workshops, so we can go deeper into each topic, do more live testing, and answer more questions.

Course members, you’ll find the Zoom meeting info for both sessions on the tutorial page, and/or in each of the reminder emails I’ve sent out.

Video Embed Speed Case Study Complete

One of the most important parts of the upcoming Video SEO course is how to embed videos into your posts and not have them slow down your site.

Straight YouTube embeds are insanely heavy.

It took me about 20 hours to do a full speed case study on all of the different ways you can embed YouTube videos, including:

• YouTube Gutenberg block, which is oEmbed
• Video Gutenberg block, which is also oEmbed
• iFrame in the Custom HTML Gutenberg block
• Both oEmbed and iFrame in the Classic editor

I then tested each of those with various methods of speeding them up.

The fastest, by far, is to lazy load the iFrame code.

And there is another perk to using iFrame code. It can still be customized to show only suggested videos at the end from your own channel instead of suggestions from related YouTube videos from other channels. 

That’s a big deal!!!!

The problem is that folks who run ads on their sites can’t use the iFrame/lazy load method because their ads also are in iFrames and already have lazy load applied to them.

Yoast Video SEO plugin speed tests

A couple of weeks ago, team Yoast announced that they added a new setting to the Yoast Video SEO plugin to help speed up YouTube video embeds.

I was very excited to test that in this case study.

But what I found was that it doesn’t work well for speed.

It mimics lazy load in that it displays a placeholder image, with a play button image on top of it.

And then it doesn’t actually load the YouTube player with the video until the visitor hits that play button.

While the plugin allows you to choose the width of the video, the thumbnail is quite large. I think it’s the thumbnail you uploaded as your cover image to YouTube. The reason I think that is because I set the video width to 640 and the thumbnail was 1280, which is the size I upload to YouTube.

Plus, the image file wasn’t fully optimized and it had a Baseline render, which is much slower than a Progressive render.

READ: How to Optimize Images with Squoosh for more on why those things are important and start using it to optimize your images prior to upload.

There is a place to add your own thumbnail, which is likely what we’ll be doing anyway. But I want to know where it’s getting the native one

On top of that, the little play button image file couldn’t be found, so that was broken on the first few tests too. I’m not sure why it showed up later.

I’ve contacted Yoast support about all of this and offered to share my case study data with them.

I also told them why we like using iFrames, especially for that trick with what suggested videos it shows at the end.

I’ll keep you posted on what they say.

But, as I mentioned in the Spill the Beans livestream last Tuesday night, I don’t intend to test other popular video embed plugins before I release the course. I simply don’t have the time right now, and I want to give Yoast a chance to make their plugin all we need, since we’ll definitely be using it for the extra video schema markup anyway.

And, I want to get this course launched!!!

Video Schema Markup Testing

For the video embed speed testing I used Astra on my sandbox site.

And I had intended to use it for the schema markup testing too.

But, Astra natively outputs the older schema markup called Microdata, just like Genesis and many other theme frameworks do.

However, for the last couple of years, Google has preferred the newer schema markup language called JSON-LD. And that’s the type of schema all Yoast plugins output too.

The problem is that Astra does not have a mechanism to sense when you are using an SEO plugin and gracefully back out its own native SEO. There is a line of code you can put into the Astra theme files to turn off their schema markup. And I did that. 

But I thought that Astra was also outputting breadcrumbs that have schema markup.

I had turned off breadcrumbs in Yoast SEO. And there are no breadcrumbs at the top of the post.

I thought what I was seeing in Astra was the Previous and Next post links at the bottom of each post.

And that just makes more entries in the Rich Results of schema markup for me to wade through.

So, I switched over to Genesis for these markup tests, as it does have a sensor to back out its SEO gracefully when it detects Yoast. And it’s still outputting the breadcrumbs!!

I checked, changed, and resaved the breadcrumbs setting to no avail. 

So, I found a tutorial from Yoast for breadcrumb errors and how to check if they are indeed coming from the Yoast plugin, and they are.

I’ve also started seeing breadcrumbs in site audits, even when the client says they are turned off. And now we know why.

So, I posted about this in the plugin support forum, as it’s on the free version part of it.

They replied that since v15.8, breadcrumb schema will appear on all pages except 404. 

Out of curiosity I asked why schema markup is being output on something that is not in use.

They replied that it is a placeholder.

Well, okay, but why?

I decided not to pursue it further at this time.

LOTS of schema to test and checked

Folks, these are VERY time consuming tests!!!!

As you know, Yoast SEO will pick up the title, featured image, and first words on your post for the meta data if you don’t manually add those things into the plugin’s fields. 

And the Yoast Video SEO plugin has its own fields. But it can pick up the default elements if you don’t fill them in, or the ones from what you filled in with the Yoast SEO plugin, or the things you filled into the Yoast Video SEO plugin.

And all of that info is picked up in multiple places for the schema markup.

I did figure out what is output where and how to best make use of all these entries you have available. 

Yeah, you could just let it go at the defaults. But, I’m betting there are more SEO perks with adding different info into different places because of the different ways Google can feature your content as the post or in the various places it shows YouTube videos.

And we want to ensure we are optimizing our meta data for each.

All of these things are just a few of the reasons why this course will be like no other.

I very seriously doubt most video SEO trainers are even capable of doing deep testing like this, much less willing to give the time needed to make it happen.

And I am so thankful to be past the mind-numbing case study testing for this course!!!!

Testing with Video SEO Volunteers

On Sunday I did a livestream in the special private group we have just for the video SEO testers to show them the full course outline and where we can show off examples from them for certain things in the course.

Plus, we’re ready to start our DIY and Recipe post testing. 

That will include another look at the SEO they have now, which was a little all over the place in the initial tests.

And then we’ll be testing with a straight YouTube embed while using the Yoast Video SEO plugin, and checking that schema markup output.

I’ll also be testing the Yoast How-To Gutenberg block as well as the how-to part of the Create plugin plus its recipe section. And of course, we’ll be testing with the WP Recipe Maker plugin too.

Video SEO course launch coming soon

Now, this extra DIY and Recipe testing is not required for me to launch the course.

In fact, there’s a lot to do with getting it setup.

So, simultaneously with doing these extra tests, I’ll be spinning up that member area in the BlogAid Learning Center and getting these volunteer testers into the course, as there are bunches of tutorials prior to the embed ones.

I’m anxious to get their feedback and make any suggested tweaks or clarifications while adding these new tutorials.

After that comes the official soft launch to all of my BB Hub members, and then later to the public.

So, it’s getting close!! My guess is about 3 weeks for getting the bulk of the course uploaded and all testing completed enough to add those extra tutorials.

Boutique Hosting update

I met live last week with the lead dev of the new boutique hosting for migration training.

He already knows all of the tech. But we wanted to go through my process so that he can do migration pre-checks and after-migration changes and such just like I do them for my clients.

That way, for any of my clients who are already current with their site audits and just want to move to the new hosting, they can bypass my site services wait list and have the new hosting server admin do the move.

I’ll be contacting all of my current site audit clients who expressed interest in the new hosting as soon as we have things ready to go. We’re hoping that will be near the end of the month or first part of May.

Site Services update

This past week I had several folks with open projects taking spring break trips, plus I finished up several other open projects. And I only onboarded 2 new projects that will either be relatively quick because it is an audit checkup, or because it has things for the client to do right up front.

That is what freed my time up to do these deep case studies and work almost exclusively on the Video SEO course stuff.

Of course, that means I also took an income hit for the week, and will be again this week.

But, limiting my client workload is the only way to get this course launched. I need 8-10 uninterrupted hours a day to get in the groove with these mind-numbing case study data gathering chores. 

And I can’t do that while having to change gears every 15 minutes to deal with client work, emails, and fires.

So, trust me when I say that I’m highly motivated to get this course launched and get back to client service work asap.

I will also be looking over my wait list to see if I need to reorder it a bit.

A few of my clients who are coming in for their regular site audit checkup also want to combine that with migrating to the new boutique hosting.

If any of those are near the top of the list, I’ll be asking if it’s okay to bump them down by a month for when the new hosting becomes available.

So, for those you who I guessed at late April or May for your project, you may jump to the top of the list soon.

And I’ll be reaching out to you as I reorder the list.

New TOS for Site Audit Clients

As you know, a couple of months ago I started revamping all of the messaging on BlogAid to better reflect the types of site owners I can best help, and to clarify what you get with each service.

And site audit clients get all kinds of perks.

But, only the clients who are current with their site audits will qualify for the new boutique hosting.

I’m writing up those requirements this week and will have them out to you as soon as I can.

And while I’m drawing up those docs, I’m also creating a new Terms of Service for site audit client perks too.

Those perks include:

• Discount on site audit checkups
• Discounts on BlogAid courses
• Free access to a private member area with tutorials, live sessions, and info not released to the public
• Free access to our private Facebook group for support

The new TOS will reflect the new messaging on BlogAid as well as the requirements for the boutique hosting.

If you are not current with your site audit, then you are not interested in keeping up with the changes.

On top of that, many of the tutorials and info I release are for folks who have their sites current, and these new instructions may break things on your site, or not work as expected if your site isn’t up to date.

Plus, I can’t do free support for you under those conditions because I can’t anticipate what may happen on your site.

I will be sending the new TOS out to all site audit clients as soon as I finish it. 

You will have the choice to either get current or leave the member area and our FB group.

Site stuff changes all the time

Site audits have never been a once-and-done service.

And with the rapid pace of change these days, it’s critically important that you get your audit checkup every 12-18 months.

A few months ago I changed the TOS for that and let folks know that if they come in after 18 months then it will not qualify as an audit checkup because too much will have changed for me to simply update as I go. It would need to be a full audit at the full rate, which was still at $195 at that time. The flat rate is now $275, which is what it actually costs me to even offer the service.

Several site audit clients got on my wait list pronto and got their discounts.

FYI, audit checkups are at my hourly rate and they are super fast, which makes them way cheaper than a full audit. And they include the updates and fixes, which an audit does not.

So, once you get your site squared away, you’ll know how to keep it that way, and then it’s just a matter of a few updates for the changes that have happened since. Or cleaning out orphaned stuff from even more plugins or such that you changed in that time.

How to request your audit checkup

Visit the site audit page to see what is included now and to refresh your memory on how the project goes. 

And then click the button to request your audit, which will take you to the application form and fill that out.

That form has several new questions on it, and is what gets you into my queue.

Just mention if it is an audit checkup.

New Masterminds coming this summer

One of the other reasons I want to ensure that we only have folks keeping current and serious about making money in the private groups is that I’ll be offering new masterminds soon.

The idea for these came out of the live session we had back in January where we discussed what it will take to be successful with your site in 2021 and beyond. 

And it’s the beyond part that we will be focusing on in these masterminds.

(If you had your audit after January, you can see the replay of that meeting in the BB Hub member area.)

We have some serious intelligence and experience in our village. And several folks will be leading the mastermind groups to share their experience and expertise with different platforms and ways of doing things.

That way we all benefit.

And some of those villagers have their own courses or are thinking about developing them based on the things we cover.

The first few of these will be exploratory and free and we’ll see which directions we want to go based on what folks bring to it and where the interest lies.

And this village is the first place I go to ask for volunteers for things like the Video SEO testing too.

So, it’s super important now that we have folks who meet the TOS so that we are sure we are supporting folks, and getting info from folks, who are truly business minded and super serious about making money, plus willing to participate and do the challenges and such that we offer in these special groups.

And if you’ve ever been in a mastermind group, you already know why this is important.

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

Speed Tips

How WP Fastest Cache and Cloudflare work together

One of my site audit clients asked, “If WP Fastest Cache and Cloudflare both do caching, why do we need them both?”

The term caching is somewhat generic, so that adds to the confusion about this.

WPFC is also an optimization plugin, and does minification and combine/defer of render blocking elements. Cloudflare (CF) doesn’t do minification as aggressively and doesn’t do the combine/defer at all.

WPFC also controls the browser caching directives, CF does not. 

That tells the visitor’s browser what to download once and then hold in their system for days, in case the visitor wants to read more posts then, or in that timeframe. It will be stuff on every page, like your logo.  

CF “caches” by taking the WPFC optimized copy from the host once and then delivering it to mirrored location sites all over the globe so it can be delivered locally to the area it serves.

That cuts down on every single visitor having to pull directly from the host, which conserves hosting resources so you can get more traffic from a cheaper hosting package.

And it cuts out all the internet wires and hubs for visitors far away from the host server location. Those things can get backlogged and slow things down.

WPFC is local and knows when things change on your site. It then purges its affected cache and nudges CF to pick up a new copy too.  

CF stops most bad bots before they ever hit your hosting, which also conserves hosting resources. We use CF as much for security as speed.

I hope this little brief explanation helps you get a better grip on what each thing does and why we need both.

Google changed Cumulative Layout Shift calculation

It will be interesting to see how wildly this new calculation swings with this change on the highly unreliable Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console.

Since Lighthouse testers didn’t change, just Google’s reporting, our test results will be the same.

Also keep in mind that the CRUX report that Google uses is based on feedback from actual Chrome users who visit your site and it is taken on the 75% mark for an average.

The testers do no such averaging and return results based on the browser, device, and load speed that you select to test with.

That’s also why I updated my tester tutorials in the Webmaster Training to show how to test under different conditions so you can see CLS and other Core Web Vital issues.

Security Tips

Cloudflare email about IPs

This past week Cloudflare sent some folks an email about changes to their IP addresses.

If you get it, read it carefully as it mentions changes of IPs issued from CF itself.

It has nothing to do with your IPs that you have whitelisted.

And no action is required on your part so you can ignore it.

FYI, the BB Hub Facebook group is the place to ask and find out about stuff like this.

There is no way I can answer 100 emails individually, so please search the group to see if it has already been asked and/or post it there if you don’t see it.

Security Tips

Cloudflare’s Newly Revamped Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Cloudflare has retooled their Web Application Firewall and is rolling it out all during April.

I have not seen the new interface yet, and I’ll be reporting on it when I do.

Plus, I’ll be updating the webmaster tutorials for it then too.

The WAF is available on the Pro plan, and honestly, that alone makes it worth paying for, and is why I couldn’t sleep without my money-making sites being on it. You also get plenty more speed perks too!!

The current WAF already blocks 57 billion cyber threats per day.

They are changing out some of the code to be even more nimble with reacting to bad bot attack vectors so it can block them more quickly for us.

New Cloudflare Super Bot Fight feature is a bust 

Last week I reported on a new feature that Cloudflare recently rolled out called Super Bot Fight Mode for folks on both the Pro and Enterprise level plans.

It looks super helpful in combating the increased number of bots we have from everywhere now, including more SEO agencies like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Unfortunately, on the Pro plan, there is no way to customize the bot agents.

And that would likely impair folks running ads or those who are paying for SEO agency services like SEMRush.

Those settings are only on the Enterprise level plan.

The Cloudflare forum is blowing up with Pro plan users who are pissed off about this, saying it renders the feature totally unusable on the Pro plan.

And I have to agree.

Blocking Bots Manually

There are ways to call out bot user agents by name in our robots.txt file to keep them from crawling our sites.

But the robots.txt file is a suggestion. And ill-behaved bots do what they want anyway.

I’d really like to be able to do this at Cloudflare and block them before they even hit our hosting.

The last time I tried that it didn’t work.

But that was maybe a couple of years ago. And Cloudflare has introduced new rule set interfaces since then.

I may very well outsource this to the lead server admin and site tech at the new boutique hosting to monitor the hits to the host at a deeper level than we can see with the aggregated numbers in AWStats. And then see just how much in resources we are losing from it.

Then we’ll try disallowing in robots.txt and see if it helps.

And then disallow in Cloudflare and see if that makes any difference.

Maybe we can run those tests this summer and I’ll keep you posted if so, and if there are any worthwhile actions to take.

Limit access to login page

Years ago some site techs suggested that you should hide your login page URL as a way to keep bots from hammering it.

But, bad bots got wise to that and the technique stopped working within about a year of it becoming popular. That was about 4 years ago, yet the myth of doing it still lingers in some posts for securing your site.

Cloudflare has a Rate Limit feature that I’m checking into for helping with this.

It doesn’t hide your URL, it just stops bad bots from hammering it.

Bad bots are automated and they do rapid fire attempts to break your login credentials.

What this Rate Limit thing does is monitor how many attempts happen in a short time frame.

If it sees a bunch from one IP then it blocks that IP from accessing that link anymore.

This feature is available on all plans, and Cloudflare even has a 1-click deployment for it.

So, I’ll be testing this out soon and see how well it works.

The only caveat I can see is if a bad bot hits from the same IP address that you use. But the odds of that are pretty low.

Login Lockdown kicks bad bots too

We already have a little plugin on our sites that protects our login page from bad bots.

After 3 rapid fire failed attempts it blocks the IP for an hour.

We’ll be keeping that as the deadbolt lock on our front door.

But I want to see about adding this Cloudflare blocking feature does too, as another layer of security that kicks bots to the curb before they ever hit our hosting, much less our login page.

Theme Tips

Kadence acquired by iThemes

Well, I sure was sorry to see this announcement.

Me and my webmasters and clients loathe all things iThemes.

In fact, the first webmaster who reported the news in our FB group asked if this will change our testing plans.

It won’t.

Kadence is just getting too popular for us to ignore.

FYI, I broke this news the day it happened in our Spill the Beans livestream last Tuesday night.

And another webmaster who attended reminded us that iThemes has purchased other plugins and such and left them alone.

All we can hope is that they will stay hands off Kadence too.

Gutenberg Tips

Update on Full Site Editing

In a recent WP Briefing podcast Josepha Haden spoke about the 5 groups that make up the WP ecosystem, including the Leadership group she is in as WP’s executive director.

In that podcast she said:

“The second thing on our small list of big things is that the Gutenberg 10.4 release is coming out later this week on April 14th. It’s an important release because it’s when we take a look at the current iteration of full site editing tools that we have, and decide if it’s ready to get into the WordPress 5.8 release.”

And FYI, she’s referencing the Gutenberg plugin, which we don’t use.

We are still quite a ways away from Full Site Editing being the norm.

But, having a bigger part of the base of it rolled into WP is what will unleash all theme devs to start building their compatible theme bases for it.

And things will start taking off quickly with it after that.

I expect by the end of this year that we will see at least minimally viable Full Site Editing theme frameworks.

A bigger split is coming

And that is going to split framework support, sort of like the way it is now with themes and plugins having to support Gutenberg content editor with blocks while still making it work on Classic Editor too.

In fact, Genesis has already forked their framework. Last year they rolled out the new Genesis Pro framework that will support Full Site Editing. And I’m guessing they are working on compatible themes for it.

Theme revamp projects

If you are considering a theme revamp, go ahead and do it with the theme frameworks currently available.

I don’t expect Full Site Editing compliant themes to have all of the kinks worked out until sometime in 2022.

Nor do I expect most plugins with widgets to even begin having FSE compliant versions until at least then too, though they are being requested to develop those as we speak.

I just paid to have my book site completely redone in Astra.

So, I’m putting my money where my mouth is with this suggestion.

The themes we have available right now will be supported for at least the next 4 years.

So, don’t sweat it.

Get on the Gute train now

That said, you do need to switch over from the Classic Editor to the native Gutenberg editor sooner rather than later – like now.

When Gutenberg first rolled out, Matt Mullenweg himself said that they only planned to support the Classic Editor through 2021.

I don’t know if that will hold or if it will be early 2022, but the end of it is in sight.

Now is the time to jump into my Gutenberg Ninja course.

I tell you:

• exactly how to clone your site to make the switch so you can play without goofing up your live site
• What will happen to your current content formatting
• How to continue editing that content as normal with the Classic Block
• How to switch pages and posts over to blocks
• How to easily create anything you want with Gutenberg, including fancy landing pages

Go read the testimonials of all the other site owners who dreaded the switch until they got into the course.

They found it fun and easy to do and now they are so happy they made the switch, and even happier with all the great looking fancy stuff that they can create!!

Wrap Up

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

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