Tips Tuesday – No WebP Default, Find Target Audience, Cheating Speed Testers

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Progress on the new GA4 course and why I’ll start with reports tutorials
• Updates to themes happening on BlogAid member sites
• WordCamp US was this past weekend
• Does WP need a project manager?
• Who finally stopped WebP as default from going into WP core
• Is WP-Optimize just fooling the testers and not really making sites fast?
• What is a target audience and how to find yours – and the ones you don’t even think you have
• How WP dropping support for older versions impacts your site security
• Why we’ll hear screams with the PHP 8 update in November
• The best way to get your site ahead and you out of panic mode

Listen to the Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

BlogAid Happenings

This past week was a bit of chaos with small fires popping up all over to stamp out. So, if your site has been experiencing some minor goofy, you’re not alone.

And the internet in my whole ‘hood was in and out for most of one day. I got behind in my work, but my house is clean! That’s what I do when I can’t get online. 

How about you?

BlogAid Course Happenings

GA4 Course Setting Scenarios Progress

If you’ve already installed the GA4 tracking code on your site, but you didn’t go through all of the settings and coordinate them between the different settings areas, I guarantee that you’re not tracking what’s happening on your site very well.

And if you didn’t set up your own custom reports, what you’re seeing in the default reports is pretty worthless.

This week I’ll be creating setting scenarios for the upcoming GA4 course. 

One scenario will cover the global settings that all of us need. And then I’ll be making scenarios to track videos, funnels, and conversions and such too. 

There are truly just too many settings that have to be coordinated to cover them in a meaningful way otherwise. I think these scenarios will help you make good sense of the what and the why with it.

And then I’ll dive into how to create custom reports so you can find the type of info you’re used to seeing on the Universal Analytics that we have now, plus a WHOLE lot more info that you’re going to want so you can see how different aspects of your site are working for you.

And then I start my deep dive into Google Tag Manager because GA4 is meant to be used with that to get the most meaningful tracking metrics.

Let me tell you, for as complex as it is to set up now, it really does offer a lot more insight into the traffic on your site and what your visitors are seeing and acting upon.

I’m still aiming for an October release date of the course. 

But, I can see now that the hardest part of this for me will be figuring out how to split up and order the tutorials to make them manageable for you.

The course survey replies I got said folks strongly preferred to have all the tutorials available so they could just get it done in one sitting.

I don’t think anybody can get it done in one sitting. It’s that complex. 

You really do have to know the why of the settings, not just the how. It’s not like GA3 where you just configure a couple of settings and then it spits out useful info. 

And that’s where splitting the tutorials up into scenarios is really going to help. 

You’ll see how to coordinate a group of settings and how that info appears on a report.

In fact, I’m thinking about starting the tutorials with the reports section first so you can see how much more powerful GA4 reporting can be. And that’s going to get you excited about learning how to configure the settings to spit out that kind of info for you.

Plus, doing it that way will help you build a custom report as you go through the course too, as you’ll have the end goal in mind while you’re making choices with the settings.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress with it.

Course Site Theme Updates This Week and Next

The month of September is a little slow for client work. Most of my clients are getting all of their holiday posts and promotions in order now that the kids are back in school and such.

So, this is a good time for me to tackle theme updates on my 2 member sites. 

At one time those themes were based on the BlogAid theme. And over the last 4 years they have been tweaked on to keep them current, or add new styles and such that I needed along the way. But they weren’t tweaked the same and now they are not like each other and far away from being like BlogAid. And that’s making me pretty crazy to work in them.

Both course site themes are in Genesis. Marcy Diaz of Amethyst Website Design is a fellow webmaster and our resident Genesis expert. And she is doing a super job of clearing out all of the old code and styles and such that are no longer needed and bringing the themes up to spec for Gutenberg and WP core code too.

Everything will be in blocks now too. Well, all the major pages will be. I’ll finish converting the tutorials to blocks as I update them.

Today, the Webmaster Training site is in maintenance mode as she makes the theme changeover and I do my checks. And then next Tuesday we’ll move on to the BlogAid Learning Center that has all of the other courses on it.

I don’t think you’ll notice much in the way of style changes on either. We kept those pretty much the same.

That’s just one more perk of working with a designer who knows how to make block styles!!!

And this is one more reason why I advocate hiring out design. A good webmaster designer is worth paying for!!! And that’s being done for me while I’m working on the things that help my clients and make me money, like putting out all the little fires that popped up this week and making the GA4 course.

Outsourcing things that are not your forte are so worth it.

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

WordPress Tips

WordCamp US 2022 Happened

WordCamp US was this past weekend in San Diego and marks the return of live events. Actually, this one was hybrid, as they live streamed it too.

I’ll be watching the replays as I can and reporting to you on what was taught and discussed, including Matt’s keynote address which included the roadmap for WP through 2023.

Does WP Need a Project Manager?

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WP has long since left the days of being a handful of devs sitting in a coffee shop determining what should be built to advance the software forward.

But they still act that way and allow each iteration of the software to be advanced by a different team that’s mostly made up of volunteers.

Plus, there are all kinds of team “committees” now that work on different aspects of WP and none of them are coordinated well internally much less with each other.

Great disaster examples of this structure are clearly evident with:

• How the release of Gutenberg went, or perhaps more accurately described as being shoved down everyone’s throat, including the developers that caused a major split in the community.
• How Gutenberg development destroyed Accesibilities compliance over and over and over again to the point that the lead of that team resigned in sheer frustration
• Most recently with the debacle called the WP Performace Team where sub-committees decided what was best for WP despite enormous negative feedback and pushed their ideas forward anyway. (We have more news on that and I’ll share in a moment.)
• So much of the focus is now on FSE (Full Site Editing) that is taking up way more dev time than it deserves in light of the fact that most designers and developers don’t even want it.

And not to mention the redesign by committee on just 2 pages of the WP site that took weeks instead of hours to do and was such a waste of time that even Matt himself publicly complained about it.

In my opinion, WP has lost its way and is severely behind every other 3rd party platform, and even way behind the vendors who make things that run on WP.

I think if they want to continue being the leader in the space, they desperately need better internal leadership.

Go listen to this podcast on Post Status with Lesley Sim where she outlines what real project management could look like for WP. In my mind, it’s the only way forward for the software.

And all of this has everything to do with why I’m no longer WP exclusive in my business and why I’m looking beyond bloggers for clients.

WP is still the best option for bloggers. But that’s all it is the best option for anymore.

WebP in Core Crushed

Halle-freaking-lujah! 

This weekend, Matt Mullenweg himself publicly commented on the whole WebP by default in core for WP 6.1 debacle.

And in the most politically correct way possible, said hell to the no!!!

He went on to say that it is the roll of WP to natively support modern file formats. But switching formats on upload should be relegated to plugin territory.

Right!!!! 

This was the main message we were trying to get through to the devs who proposed this mess.

Changing file formats on upload comes with a whole range of issues, that were proven over and over again, and ignored over and over again, in the WP Performance Team that proposed doing it.

Plus, something like this needs to remain a choice and never be on by default.

Other image optimization plugins already have this option and folks can use it if they want to.

Matt even suggested that he would like to see WP develop such a plugin and have it as a free alternative to these other brand plugins that have both a free and pro plan.

Folks, you know I fought this thing tooth and nail earlier this year until I could no longer tolerate the insult and the stress with suffering the hubris of the devs.

I gave up and decided to dedicate myself to finding a way for us to turn this mess off if it came into WP core.

And I’m delighted to know that the commander-in-chief said no, and that will be the end of it coming into WP core for the foreseeable future.

Plus, if WP did have a project manager, perhaps we could have avoided this entire debacle and insane waste of everyone’s time in the first place.

Speed Tips

Is WP-Optimize Just Cheating the Testers?

Last week there was a bit of WP drama when a well-known “web performance enthusiast” tweeted that the WP-Optimize plugin, made by the same folks who make UpdraftPlus, was not really optimizing a site, it was just cheating the online testers into thinking the site was fast.

The folks at WP-Optimize tried to refute the claim, but they failed.

Folks, there are LOTS of cheater plugins like this, most of them way worse in how they do it.

All I can say is that you get what you pay for with cheap site techs who throw crap like this at your site instead of actually finding and fixing the speed drags like I do in a site audit.

We don’t use trickery here.

And you see the real test data and get it explained in non-geek-speak too.

It’s plain as day what’s wrong with the site and what changes need to be made.

Plus, you learn how to keep your site fast and secure once it gets that way too.

Marketing Tips

What is a Target Audience and How to Find Yours

Even though this post on Wave Wyld Media is about TikTok, it’s a super good article for everyone to read about how to define and find your target audience.

And even if you think you know who that is, go read the article anyway.

Things change online, and so does your audience.

I remember the first time I ran Facebook ads. I targeted the audience that Google Analytics told me was visiting my site and the audience that bought my courses already.

I had a few sales from those ads.

But just for fun, I changed the demographic to be a far younger audience and outside the niches that typically purchased for me.

The sales blew the roof off!!!!!

And then I began looking for where this other demographic hung out and I started hanging out there too. And I started getting way more clients.

Now that I’m taking BlogAid through its 3rd major iteration with what types of clients I serve, I’ve been researching who my potential target markets are and where they hang out. Once I find where they hang out I can see what questions they have. And seeing the same pain points over and over tells me what courses and services they need.

So, I invite you to go read this article and open yourself to audiences you may not even be aware of that would love your content.

And open your mind to the fact that more and more folks in all demographics are preferring short-form content for discovery too.

This has everything to do with why I stopped doing TikTok beyond Tips Tuesday, and I’ve even stopped doing that now.

Bloggers who are interested in site services are just not hanging out on TikTok, and WP is a dirty word there. But, the new audiences for the new focus of BlogAid is there and I’m working on my new messaging for them. And the audience for my new secret project is definitely there too.

Security Tips

WordPress Drops Security Updates for Super Old Versions

WordPress has always prioritized remaining backwards compatible, even to their detriment at times.

But with the addition of Gutenberg and the necessity of moving more into JavaScript, they started forcing more theme and plugin devs to bring their wares up to spec with modern code. 

That includes making plugins and themes more compliant with current security standards too.

But, WP has been doing its best to keep really old WP versions updated with at least those security standards. However, they have to cut it off at some point.

Last week WP announced that they would drop security support for versions 3.7-4.0.

Yeah, I can hear you saying, “3.7, who uses that anymore? We’re up to 6.0 now.”

Of the 445 million sites currently running WP, at least a quarter of them are abandoned. Not only are they running super old versions of WP, some of them are still on PHP 5.6 which hasn’t been supported in years.

Why should you care about this?

Because if your site is on shared hosting with one of the big box brands, it’s sitting next to sites like that.

Lack of updates is the #1 reason sites get hacked. And sometimes hackers can find a backdoor on those sites that give them access to the host server, and then everyone on that server is compromised.

So, no matter how glorious and protected you think your site is, it lives in the ghetto.

This is specifically why me and my BB Hub site audit clients now have our sites on what we call the HOA side of (affiliate link) Iridium Hosting. Our sites are super secure and optimized. And it’s just us there, so no ghetto.

Iridium is boutique hosting. And Dustin runs a secure setup. So, even if you go to the public side of Iridium, you won’t be allowed to let your site compromise the whole server with lack of critically important measures, like insanely old WP or PHP.

We’ll hear screams when PHP 8 update rolls out

This is also why I took me and my peeps through the PHP 8.0 update this summer. Support for 7.4 will cease in November and any decent host should force the upgrade for security reasons.

Any of my peeps who have not already moved to Iridium and had to do the upgrade on their current host can testify that sites will break when upgraded. 

Other hosts have crap PHP settings. That’s one of the big reasons why we left them. They don’t know how to set up their servers anymore.

And even if your site doesn’t break, I guarantee that your speed and security settings are borked at those hosts. I can also guarantee that the whole server is running slower because of their poor settings.

So, I expect to hear screams come November when that PHP 8 update rolls out. 

And me and my peeps will be calmly going about our business because we are so far ahead of the curve and got our incompatible themes and plugins and such squared away already. And we didn’t get our speed or security borked by our host.

Get Ahead and Out of Panic

Wouldn’t you like to avoid the surprise and headache with all the tech changes, or the latest edict from Google?

Get a site audit and into our BB Hub Plus group and get the real site support you need.

Wrap Up

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

Thanks for sharing this podcast and post with your blogging buddies, and for leaving comments and reviews too.

Subscribe to all BlogAid Posts via email so you never miss anything!

Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.