Chris W. Smith

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WordPress Theme Bloat: Premium Themes and Layout Builders

February 5, 2015 By Chris Smith Leave a Comment

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

Inspired by a thread on Reddit, let’s look at one of the main complaints about WordPress these days: bloated installations that run slow.

One of WordPress’s greatest strengths is the fact that anyone can purchase or download a premade theme and have a “custom” website up in a short span of time. It’s also one of the things that can cause the most headache for more experienced users. Many theme developers are obsessed with cramming as much functionality into a theme as possible in order to attract the greatest number of potential users. The byproduct of that is a theme that causes the site to load slowly, causes conflicts with plugins, or is simply difficult to arrange the content the way you want.

The vast majority of users who buy layout builder themes probably don’t actually need them. With custom-built WordPress themes, just about any layout can be accommodated through the use of widget areas and custom post types; both of which are built-in functions of WordPress. The will cut down on the number of running functions in the back end of the site, and speed up how quickly the site loads and increases the number of concurrent users it can serve.

Additionally, a custom WordPress theme can be geared towards serving exactly the sort of content that the site needs. Instead of forcing your content into a pre-built theme’s layout, a custom built theme can be laid out in a way that makes sense for the information you want to communicate to your users. Using the custom post type functions, you can configure custom “things” for displaying and managing on your site. Most pre-built themes don’t use custom post types, and the ones that do use them have a lot of added overhead with functions that make them possible to configure in a theme manager.

Finally, a growing reason many companies prefer custom built WordPress themes is for search engine optimization. Although many pre-built themes have SEO functions built in, they tend to be extremely basic, or even outdated. It’s also more difficult to add functionality to premium themes in regards to things like OpenGraph code, A/B testing, or heatmap tracking. Custom built themes give you the space to choose where and how you’d add these sorts of things, and it makes it easier to troubleshoot when it’s not working properly.

Filed Under: Speed, Themes, Web Development, WordPress Tagged With: custom post types, layout builder, plugins, premium theme, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, speed, themes

Top 3 WordPress SEO Tips For 2011

March 5, 2011 By Chris Smith Leave a Comment

WordPress is an excellent CMS for building easily edited and updated websites. It also has a well-structured architecture that performs reasonably well and is mostly well-optimized for search engines. However, depending on your use of WordPress, there are a few tips to keep in mind when building your WordPress website.

Well Written Content

Without decent content on a page, getting a page to rank organically is an extremely tough and often fruitless endeavor. Simply stuffing keywords has been proven countless times to cause a page to perform very poorly, and provides no real value to a human who finds your page. The best rule of thumb is to write for people first, and fill their need before considering any SEO implications.

Use An SEO-Optimized Theme

The core of WordPress is pretty good by itself when it comes to structuring content for SEO considerations. However, the bulk of the work falls upon the theme (also called a “template”). Many of the more common frameworks (like Genesis and Thesis) are very well constructed and perform very well in respect to SEO. Some even have configurable settings dedicated to common parameters that may need to be tweaked for optimization purposes.

Use An SEO Plugin

While the optimization of many of the popular theme frameworks is fairly well thought out, there are many important details that the theme simply cannot control. Robots.txt files, .htaccess editing, and XML sitemap files are all important for proper crawling and indexation. Most of the better SEO plugins for WordPress (Yoast’s WordPress SEO, SEO Ultimate, and Platinum SEO) can control these natively. If you prefer another SEO plugin that cannot access these settings, there are tons of standalone plugins for each of these functions.

There are thousands of SEO tools and plugins available, but keeping these three simple tips will be a great start to optimizing your WordPress blog or website for SEO.

Filed Under: SEO, Themes, WordPress Tagged With: genesis seo, Google, SEO, seo tips, wordpress, wordpress seo, wordpress tips, yoast seo

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