If you’ve ever run a PageSpeed or other speed test for the mobile version of your site, you’ve undoubtedly been horrified by the low speed and score compared to the desktop version of your site.
In this post I’ll explain:
Why mobile performance is typically worse
The primary cause of slow mobile pages
How to create mobile-specific versions of your pages
How to remove unnecessary files from your mobile pages
Optimizing for mobile does take a bit of extra effort since site owners are usually “retrofitting” their sites for mobile performance.
If you are starting a new site, it will be easier if you consider mobile performance from the start, and make it a priority.
If you are using Google PageSpeed Insights to test your WordPress site, you’ll see this “avoid enormous network payloads” warning if the total size of your page is more than 1.6MB.
It sounds technical, but this is actually one of the recommendations that you as the site owner have the most control over. Unlike some PageSpeed recommendations, you can fix this one!
If you work with clients using WordPress in any capacity, or even if you are a solo site owner, at some point, you will probably need to move a site from one server to another (also known as migrating).
In this guide I’ll show you 3 methods of migrating a WordPress site.
Migrations are required in numerous situations, such as when you’re switching webhosts, when turning a development site into a live site, or when making a test site. Even restoring a site from a backup has some similar steps.
Understanding how this process works will greatly empower you. There are a few moving parts but it’s completely possible to do, even if you are not a developer, and you will feel like a champ. I’d suggest practicing on a test site before handling anything that’s important ????
The Time To First Byte (TTFB), or server response time, of your WordPress site can be an important indicator of performance. It doesn’t represent the whole picture, but a very specific part in the process.
Time to First Byte is a measure of how fast your server responds when someone tries to visit a page on your site. Specifically, it’s measuring how long it takes from the time the browser asks the server for the page, to when the browser receives the first piece of data from the server.
Visitors want sites to feel fast, so the sooner some meaningful content is displayed on the screen, the better. TTFB can influence this – the faster the server responds, the faster content can get to the user.
While some general aspects of SEO will be touched on in this guide in the course of explaining the plugin, beginners may find that they need a more fundamental understanding of how SEO works in general, in order to get the best use out of this plugin. I have written an ebook that addresses that need: The Beginners’ Guide to SEO for Business
Yoast SEO is on most lists of ‘must-have’ WordPress plugins. But the extensive set of options it provides can seem intimidating, especially to newer users.
Yoast has a fair amount of commentary and explanatory text throughout the plugin screens so I won’t duplicate anything he’s saying there, but I’ll try and clarify the less obvious parts.
If you’ve used an older version of Yoast on a site, there are several menu tabs you’re used to seeing, that are hidden by default on first activation of more recent versions.
To access all of the settings referred to in this guide, you will need to activate the Advanced settings.
What’s the difference between a WordPress beginner, and an intermediate WordPress user?
If you’ve mastered the dashboard, are great at working with themes and plugins, what’s next? How do you progress to the next step, without necessarily become a code-slinging developer?
Definitions are obviously arbitrary, but for me, an intermediate WordPress user is someone who has mastered the dashboard, can find their way around any theme pretty quickly, and who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty behind the scenes. That might not be creating custom themes or plugins from scratch, but it likely involves customizing sites with copy/paste code snippets, tweaking CSS, migrating sites, using FTP, and generally understanding the ‘behind the scenes’ of a WordPress site. They are also familiar with WordPress best practices, such as safe ways to modify themes etc. This isn’t someone who is going to hack your site to pieces, but someone who understands the right way to do things, keeping a site future-proofed, update-able and easy for the owner to manage.
This is the kind of stuff that makes some folks shudder with horror, but in reality if you can grasp some of this stuff, it’ll give you so much more confidence. If you’re working with clients, I’d consider it not only a requirement, but your responsibility as a WordPress consultant.
So how do you get to the Intermediate stage, where to start?
If you are like a lot of users, you might be forced into it when something goes wrong on your site. Most of the cool stuff I’ve learned in WordPress, I’ve generally learned by things breaking ? It’s initiation by fire, but it forces you out of your comfort zone. And, let’s face it, there’s very little you can learn in life by staying exactly how and where you are.
