Website Optimization

[Matthew McEntire]

Hello everybody,

I am new to the video game in the Seattle area. I am looking to beef up my website to perform and look better on Google. Any tips on creating a killer WordPress site or any theme recomendations?

Here is my current site for reference. Seattle Video Production.

Thanks for the help!

[Tamara Margulis]

Hi Matthew,

I am not a designer, so can’t help with the look better aspect, but can offer this advice for the perform better in Google.

Since the latest Lighthouse update with version 6.0, it’s become increasingly harder to achieve green scores – specially for mobile.

Be mindful of the content you add on your pages, and stay away from sliders and fancy animations which are very hard to implement in a way that doesn’t drag your scores down, when not impossible.

Be mindful also of adding 3rd party scripts, those get heavily penalized by Google, even when they are theirs.

For your content creation, Gutenberg is to this date the better performing out of all page builders out there, even if the UI and available blocks are not as nice looking as other more developed builders.

In general, as a rule of thumb, the more a product (plugin, theme, etc.) can achieve “without having to write a line of code”, the worst they perform in those scoring tests, as they are usually more bloated and include a thousand features that you never end up using.

If your website is the “brochure” kind, in the sense that there is no logged in user features, and it has only static content pages, your best bet probably is to use the lightest, best-performing out of the box theme you can find, and cache as much as you can – actually cache everything.

Look into a host that offers server caching, or alternatively look into CloudFlare’s Page Cache, which can now be implemented much easier than in the past via the new Automatic Platform Optimization (APO).

If you have any specific questions, would be happy to help if I can.

[Matthew McEntire]

Thanks for the info. All really great stuff!

[Michael Beaumont]

Unfortunately using WordPress you are not going to win against hand coded competition. If everyone of your competitors is using WordPress too then that’s fine.

No point in putting years into a website that is going to be trumped by someone who can write their code in notepad.