Tips Tuesday – Real Speed Tests, Yoast DB Optimization, PHP 8 Testing, Local Fonts

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• New tutorial on how to do the Yoast database optimization after plugin update
• The next phase of our PHP 8 testing will start this week
• New Cloudflare tutorials are underway for my webmaster designers
• Do you know how many bad bots are hitting your site? It’s way more than you think! And it is costing you more than you think too.
• We lost the battle and WebP by default is coming to WP 6.1
• 5 tips to improve your content strategy
• Google delays 3^rd party cookie drop for another year
• Difference in core web vitals and Google PageSpeed Insights
• Where to get a real speed report for your site
• WordPress encourages locally hosted Google Fonts
• What I’ll be doing with fonts for my next theme

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BlogAid Happenings

We got a whole lotta movin’ and doin’ going on around here!

I believe we had a record number of site owners migrating to better hosting this past week.

And most all of them combined it with a site audit, so that saved them money too.

I am so happy and relieved to get more site owners to hosting that I know is set up correctly and won’t give us issues, especially when everyone is forced to use PHP 8.0 later this year.

Yoast SEO: How to Start SEO Data Optimization

I bet you didn’t know that just about every time you update the Yoast SEO plugin you also need to do a database optimization on its tables.

The reason you didn’t know this is because Yoast stopped putting notifications for it at the top of our admin pages.

The only place this message shows now is on the Yoast General settings page in the Notifications section. And nobody looks at that.

So, we need to be in the habit of looking there after we update the plugin.

And I’ve created a new tutorial for you on how to do it.

Of course, all of my peeps are in the habit of doing their plugin updates near to when their regularly scheduled backup just took, but I would suggest taking a new database backup anyway. 

And I show you how to do that too with UpdraftPlus. It’s way faster than taking a full backup.

BlogAid Village Happenings

PHP 8.0 Testing Next Phase

Thank you to everyone who jumped right on this and got your hosting updated, and for all of the reports you sent in.

We were able to confirm hosts and plugins that were not PHP 8 ready and we found the fixes for the majority of them.

There are a few plugins that are still not compatible yet and those vendors have been alerted.

In this next phase of testing we’ll be having a look at our PHP error logs to find issues that you may not know are happening.

I’ll be making tutorials this week for my BB Hub site audit clients and my Webmaster Training folks for how to do those checks and what to look for.

BlogAid Course Happenings

New Cloudflare Tutorials Underway

Cloudflare is innovating all the time, like every week I see something new or an interface tweak or such.

And trying to keep my Webmaster Training folks updated has meant making tutorials that have grown out like a cactus in every direction.

So, last week I went through all of the tutorials in the Cloudflare section and made a new outline so I can consolidate and revamp the tutorials.

I’ve already finished the overall tour of settings and now working on the security settings section.

Did you know that there are 30+ settings in Cloudflare for security and speed?

Just putting your site on it helps, but not nearly enough if you don’t configure it properly.

And definitely don’t get it through your hosting. You need your own Cloudflare account and to have control over where your domain points yourself too.

How Many Bots are Hitting Your Site?

One of the best security features with using Cloudflare is knocking out bad bots before they ever hit your hosting much less your site.

Did you know that you could be getting 30,000 bot hits a month on your site?

The overwhelming majority of those are bad bots too. The rest are search engine bots.

And all of them are chewing up your hosting resources that should be reserved for your human visitors.

Speaking of, human visitors are all you see in Google Analytics. You have to dig into the hosting logs to see those other bots. And that’s exactly what I do in site audits.

The perks of properly securing your site include:

• Increased site speed
• Lower hosting costs
• Less spam comments
• Less spam optins
• Less hacker bots
• Stop SEO agencies from crawling your content and giving that info to your competitors to beat you at ranking high.

But Cloudflare is just one part of your site security. 

And when you get it all done, you’ll see a 50%-70% drop in those bad bot hits, and you’ll notice the speed increase on both the front and back of the site too.

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

WordPress Tips

WebP by Default Coming in WP 6.1

Despite all objections and extreme controversy, the WP Performance Team devs who pushed to get WebP images by default into WordPress are going to get their way. It’s committed to WP 6.1, which is the next major release later this fall.

What we don’t know right now is whether it will be on by default or not, and/or whether there will be an easy way to opt out.

This thing is going to bork our sites.

And here’s how I think it will go.

Of the 445 million WP users, half won’t even know it happened.

Half of the rest won’t know to care.

And of the 1 quarter that does object, WP will say that it is a minority of users affected.

I’ll be on the lookout for a code snippet or plugin or whatever so those of us who do care can turn this crap off. 

Content Marketing Tips

5 Tips to Improve Your Content Strategy

Do you have a content strategy?

I don’t mean a list of posts you want to write. I mean a real strategy for those posts?

You need one.

Back when I got ready to flip Heartwood Art from a hobby carving site to a woodworking site, I made a list of all the things I wanted to build.

Then I made a list of all the tools I would need to do that build, including the tools I already had, didn’t have, and those that needed an upgrade to better.

And then I went online to see what others were blogging about with just those two things.

WOW! That research was so insightful.

And I picked up 100 more ideas of what I could blog about.

I was so excited, and then so overwhelmed.

I wanted to be strategic with my blogging because I had monetary goals for that site.

And that’s when I took that list of post ideas and rearranged it into a content strategy.

And it worked!!

And it’s still working.

I haven’t posted to that site in 10 months now and it’s still driving traffic and generating revenue through affiliate sales and YouTube Partner Program.

Time on site is high and bounce rate is low.

THE most impactful content strategy I used was to plan for a content silo right off the bat.

I teach you how to do that too in the DIY SEO course.

And I guarantee you that is my top strategy as I build my new secret project too.

Then last week I came across this post from Kristi Hines on Search Engine Journal titled 5 Tips to Improve Your Content Strategy and I knew it would help you get into the mindset to do this too.

I’m going to give you the tips here, but you really need to read the whole article so it will click for you.

• Think like a publisher. (I can’t tell you how insanely important this is.)
• Make sure everything fits into your sales funnel.
• Refine and document your editorial process.
• Review, refresh, replace
• Use your network

Go give this post a read and see if things start clicking for you with changing your mindset over from being a blogger to being a content entrepreneur that makes money.

Monetization Tips

Google Delays 3rd Party Cookie Drop Another Year

I honestly don’t know how Google can get away with just kicking the can down the road on Chrome privacy settings with regard to dropping 3rd party cookie tracking.

They are already being sued over it, have been for years.

And Chrome is the only browser left that hasn’t put privacy first.

Though I don’t know how they can just keep delaying, I certainly do know why.

There’s too much money at stake to be privacy-focused.

Ad revenue for everyone, including Google, will drop like lead balloon when they can’t pinpoint target who those ads are shown to.

While some bloggers see this as good news, I don’t.

I believe it will just delay site owners who blog for ads as their primary revenue an excuse to procrastinate in getting busy with establishing themselves as direct-pay content entrepreneurs.

And let me tell you, the bloggers who have already moved toward that model are making WAY more money now. Ads are just a side income for them. They won’t care so much when the revenue gets cut in half.

By the time this drop happens, a lot of bloggers are just going to quit because they really can’t face trying to get established in a new way when those platforms are already saturated by the early adopters. 

Let me tell you something.

Blogging for ads is the hardest and slowest way to make income. That’s what you don’t have time for.

Let me tell you something else.

There is no such thing as passive income.

Yes, I’m earning money with Heartwood Art even though I have not blogged in nearly a year.

But, I do actively promote it in related groups that I participate in.

And, if I put more time into it, I could turn it into a full-time income that would still not rely on ads. But I decided to flip it back to a hobby site for now, as I see this new secret project as being far more lucrative and sustainable for the time it takes to create what makes money.

I invite you to take all you have learned from running your site the way it is now, and apply it to a new model that earns income without ads.

And if time is the issue – think about how much time you’re spending on your site now that is not earning all the income it could.

I hear folks complain about how much time it takes to make a video. Yeah, but it gets way more eyeballs and earns way more money.

You’re going to spend time on something. Why not make it THE most lucrative payback thing?

Speed Tips

Difference in CWV and Google Pagespeed Insights

Do you check what Core Web Vitals reports in Google Search Console on your site speed?

Do you check your site speed on Google PageSpeed Insights?

You may have noticed an extreme difference in those results.

Google’s John Mueller explains why, as reported by Search Engine Journal.

You’re welcome to read what he said, but I’m going to tell you the real truth.

Both of these reports are shit.

Beyond that, they don’t even help you know what to do to improve your site speed.

And I can hear you saying, “But this is what Google thinks my site speed is!”

No, it’s not.

Google PageSpeed Insights is THE worst speed tester on the planet and has nothing to do with your real-world site speed or what Google thinks about it.

It uses:

• Moto phone
• Fast 3G connection
• Hidden testing location

If you are targeting a U.S. based audience, they are using:

• iPhone or Android – which is 4x faster than a Moto phone
• Home wifi or 4G or 5G connection, which is 2x faster than a Fast 3G connection

The reason GPSI uses what it does is because that is the global average.

But that’s not your audience.

If you want a real test of your site speed, you need to get the paid version of GTMetrix where you can set the parameters for what your visitors actually use.

That’s one of the testers I use in site audits.

Now, about that Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.

It reports what your visitors who are using Chrome are actually encountering on your site.

But it’s still not real world.

Those hits also include bots from who knows where.

One of the ways hacker bots try to pose as a human visitor is by masking themselves as using a browser to access your site. Guess which browser they use most often – yep – Chrome.

And they may be coming from proxied places where the internet is insanely slow.

None of that has anything to do with what your target audience is experiencing.

Plus, what you see in CWV is a 28 day aggregated report. If you watch it day to day, you’ll see it jump all over the place. 

It’s useless.

And none of Google’s testers give you a real clue what needs to be fixed on your site either.

I see site owners struggle to figure it out and then fix the wrong thing and never see an improvement.

Get a Real Speed Report

The site audit reports I send clients is 20-30 page of info, starting with what I find on their hosting and on their site. The performance tester reports are the last thing we look at – and we already know what the speed drags are on the site before we get there.

The reports just show how bad those things are.

It’s clear as day what needs to be changed and why. And the site owner is super happy to make those changes.

Plus, they notice speed improvements from us just cleaning out the junk on the hosting side – and even before we get to the speed tweaks.

After we’re all done, we run those speed testers again and they can clearly see that all of the changes worked with zero trickery.

What’s even better is they know how to keep their sites fast and secure from then on too.

So, stop trying to go it alone, or get cheap trickery that just makes the testers look good but doesn’t actually improve your site speed for your visitors.

Get an audit and get results, including more optins, more follows, more time on site, lower bounce rate, and more money.

This is the kind of thing that pays for itself in ways you can measure.

Theme Tips

WordPress Encourages Locally Hosted Google Fonts

Over the last year or so there has been a push by theme authors to host Google Fonts locally, meaning to put a copy on the site’s hosting rather than to bring them in from Google.

I never jumped on this bandwagon, as far as speed, because there wasn’t a really easy way to do it, and 3rd party theme fonts weren’t usually the big speed issue anyway, especially if you properly optimized the site or used common fonts that were likely already cached by the visitor’s browser.

Having way too many 3rd party fonts was an issue, though, as some themes just went overboard with them, as did too many plugins.

But, speed is not the only consideration anymore.

Now, GDPR privacy tracking is in play.

Every time a 3rd party font is requested, it has to reveal the IP of where that request originates. And that info is tracked by the 3rd party provider.

The free themes repository in WordPress had already disallowed the use of bringing in 3rd party elements like CSS or images or such. But they had made an exception for Google Fonts. 

Because of GDPR compliance, WP can no longer make that exception.

And they are encouraging all theme developers to start hosting fonts locally.

To be honest, I never had issues with using the web safe fonts that are stored in everyone’s browsers, like Verdana, Tahoma, Georgia, and more.

You can see a list of current web safe fonts on the W3 Schools site.

But, every theme base I wanted to use had Google Fonts, so I didn’t feel like putting my designer through the hoops to change over to web safe fonts.

What I’ll Be Doing for My Next Theme

But, for my new secret site project, I will be seriously looking into this, as I will for any theme upgrade I do.

I will either go to web safe fonts or host Google Fonts locally.

I suggest you ask your designer to do the same.

And while a lot of folks are doing their own theme designs these days, this is just one more reason why a designer is worth paying for.

If you want to see the speed reason, go check out a recent post I made on the BlogAid Facebook page for a mockup theme designed by Michelle at Codefetti. Without any extra speed tweaks at all, it scored perfectly. 

It’s also Accessibilities compliant too.

Plus, Michelle is one of my Webmasters and any site she sets up will be to the exact same security standards that I use for me and my clients.

Webmaster designers are definitely worth paying for.

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.

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