Make sure you own these 5 keys to your WordPress site

Audience: Beginners
Blogging Basics, WordPress Beginners

If you consider yourself to be a non-technical site owner, this post is for you. Not because you’ll necessarily like what I have to say – you might not because I’ll be asking you to do some things that are out of your comfort zone! But, there are some critical things you need to know about your site that will protect you from losing it in the future.

A lot of people use WordPress because they heard it’s easy, so they don’t like to get into the murky parts they may not understand. But behind the scenes, there are a couple of things that you can’t and shouldn’t avoid, no matter how much you may want to. These are part and parcel of owning a site and are critical for you to always maintain control over it.

I’ve had numerous clients that come to me that are at risk of losing access to their sites because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. So please make sure you have the following 5 bases covered to give yourself peace of mind.

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Speed Optimization Case Study

Speed Optimization

I recently did an optimization for insurancebrokers.com. It was a good challenge because the site wasn’t performing badly. It’s easier to show impressive results when the site is starting from a very poor baseline.

But this site had already been optimized to a large extent and the desktop performance was very good.

However, mobile performance, while decent, certainly had room for improvement.

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Improve Elementor LCP Metric With One Change

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate
Speed Optimization

While working at WP Rocket I saw so many Elementor customers struggling with a slow LCP metric, especially on mobile, due to their full-width “hero” images.

These full-width images at the top of the page often have text or other elements positioned over them, so most of the time this effect is accomplished in Elementor by using a background image on the container element.

While this looks great on the frontend of the site, it can often be damaging for the LCP score.

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10 Things You Can Learn About Your Site’s Speed From a Waterfall Chart

Audience: Beginners
Speed Optimization

PageSpeed is a useful tool for certain metrics but it lacks some specific details.
Using a tool that shows you a waterfall chart can give you a different angle on performance. GTMetrix, Webpagetest.org and DebugBear are examples of tools that provide a waterfall chart.

What’s a waterfall chart?

The waterfall chart shows a list of every file that your website loads, in the order that those requests are made.

So it pulls back the curtain and gives you a peek at what’s going on behind the scenes when someone visits your site in their browser. It helps you find bottlenecks, errors and other performance issues.

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