Chris W. Smith

WordPress Theme Bloat: Premium Themes and Layout Builders

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(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 Although many pre-built themes have SEO functions built in, they tend to be extremely basic, or even outdated.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.

Funemployment

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As of 9AM this morning, I officially joined the ranks of the unemployed freelance community.

I’ve been keeping a radio silence this weekend to mull over and discuss the situation with a few trusted friends/advisors, and making sure I have everything in order. While TopSpot Internet Marketing has been nothing short of an excellent place to work and learn, my first love has always been my freelance gigs.

To the TopSpot friends I’ve made in my time there: Keep #winning. I’ve learned a lot from everyone there (and hey, maybe I taught someone a thing here and there). I couldn’t have asked for a better company to spend my time with. If you ever need anything, you know how to reach me.

There are two areas that I am specifically passionate about: WordPress and Search Engine Optimization. I like to think that I’m extremely talented in both areas. So, that is how I’ll be (and am) making my income, through providing WordPress-specific consulting and programming, and search engine optimization services.

I’ve got a great network of people that have inspired, helped, and pushed me to go for this goal, whether it’s been through an active interaction, or simply letting me observe them in their natural habitat. I won’t name names here, but thanks for letting me be a part of what you’re doing.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with working for someone else, for the things that I want to do, a “normal job” certainly isn’t in line with those things. Other than working, I’ve set goals to do a few things: travel to a foreign country (I’ve never been outside of the US), be on a panel or a presenter at SXSW, help build the best WordPress Meetup Group ever, and get in better shape than I’ve probably ever been in. There are plenty of other goals, but these are certainly near the top of the list.

Questions? Feel free to ask me in the comments below.

Top 3 WordPress SEO Tips For 2011

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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.

Top 3 WordPress SEO Tips For 2011

By 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.

SEO Experts

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There are countless “SEO experts” available. Online, locally,…just about everywhere. They’re like fire ants. You get rid of some, and twice as many pop up later.

You have to give these guys some credit. These “SEO experts” can undoubtedly make a page appear high in search results. However, it’s for a keyphrase that is not realistically profitable (or even useful) for your business’s website. Long-tail keywords have value, but you just can’t build a business from that.

Search Engine Optimization is really becoming an archaic term. We’re no longer needing to appease the crawlers; it’s the user that is really important here. There are some things that should be done for the sake of the search engine, but ultimately, it trickles down to making it an easier surfing experience for the user.

Optimizing for the user won’t get you front page results in hours, days, or maybe even weeks. It does take time and effort to appear in natural results for your profitable keywords. And, while it’s true there are ways to game the system, these almost always result in a much more costly and time-consuming negative impact for your site. It’s simply not worth it in the short or long term.

Keep in mind that you’re selling to the user, not the search engine.

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