WordPress Plug-Ins – Time For A Diet?

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WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet. It is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and (August 2011) powers 22% of all new websites (Techcrunch).

WordPress has several major strengths including a superb, easy to use, intuitive back end which makes it easy for even technophobes to generate and manage well-presented content.

The reasons that WordPress really stands out though is because it is constantly supported and developed by an active highly skilled developer community; and it is easily extensible with the use of plugins and widgets. There are thousands of these which you can install to add extra functions and features to your site. It is very tempting to keep piling in more and more of them but there are drawbacks – each and every plug-in adds to the load your site puts on its server. This means that it will load slightly more slowly every time you add a plug-in.

When asked what they value most in a web site, people pretty consistently say that fast page loads are high in their priorities, so this matters.

In most cases the additional load from a plugin will be very small, but that is not always the case and the more you add the more the additional load will accumulate.

Importantly, plug-ins are not subject to the same quality control and testing as the WordPress core. Anyone can produce a plug-in. Some are excellent, some however are poor. Even if you choose only plug-ins which have excellent user ratings, you have no guarantee that the person who developed it isn’t going to suddenly decide to stop maintaining it and updating it.

The more plug-ins you use the more likely you are to find that they interfere with each other and that one day you add just one more, or even update an existing one and bang, the whole thing stops working.

Leaving all that aside, when you first set up your site, you started with clean, easy to read pages, aesthetically pleasing and uncluttered. With all the favourite thises and top thats, the buttons and badges (oh, and those hateful float over the top social media buttons which move around over your content when a window is resized and make it unreadable) is it still as pleasing, or is it just a wheezing, cluttered mess?

Just a thought, ignore all the people who are suggesting ten more must-have plug ins. Work out what you really need plug-ins for and get rid of the rest. Ten? Plenty.

Why I Don’t Want To Be On The First Page Of Google

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Over the last couple of years I have received a stream of calls from SEO telesales idiots. The pitch is almost always the same…. “Hi, we noticed your business isn’t on the first page of Google and we can help you get there”. Google doesn’t have a “First Page” or if it does, it is this one and there is only one way to get on there and it isn’t SEO.

The kind of thing SEO companies promise is something like “success online”, ” first page listings on Google for the most popular phrases in your industry” and so on.

Now, even though I am very vain, none of that is of interest to me. Not at all. And if you are in business, it shouldn’t interest you either. The thing is, as it happens, I am on the (sic) “first page” of Google for quite a lot of things. One of them is “cascading snow Christmas tree”, which frankly is not going to get me huge amounts of local e-commerce development work.

The aim of a business is profitability, getting the maximum return on your time and capital. High rankings in search results may be the most profitable thing you can invest in. Or not.

You see, when SEO companies promise “results” or say something like “don’t pay the second half of the contract until we have the agreed page one listings!” they are talking only about getting you high search rankings.

To be worthwhile, a high search ranking has got to refer real qualified prospects to a website who then actually buy the product or service. However relevant or important a keyphrase may seem, it doesn’t mean that:

  1. lots of people are going to search for it nor
  2. those people who do search for it are buyers.

So having a top ranking on Google does not necessarily mean that money is going to come into your pocket to replace that which the SEO company have liberated.

So, am I saying that SEO is pointless? No, absolutely not, quite the opposite.

What I am saying is that what is required is rather a lot more than high rank search results. For SEO or any other marketing activity to have value, it has to deliver not random referrals, but business. To do that requires real effort to understand your business, coupled with a range of skills which extend beyond just SEO to include marketing and programming and deliver things like:

  1. Analysing which search keyphrases are likely to deliver business value and not merely high rankings
  2. Integrating SEO work with other online and offline marketing activities
  3. Optimising your website, not for SEO keyphrases, for business – there is no point having lots of visitors if you fail to meet their expectations.
  4. Putting in place long term programmes of tracking, analysis and fine tuning to maximise the business results achieved.

 

Ten reasons I will never do business with you

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  1. I couldn’t find a real world contact address on your web site
  2. I couldn’t find a phone number.
  3. I couldn’t work out what your business’s real name is.
  4. Your web site played music/talked at me as soon as I arrived. I was listening to Classic FM on radioplayer. Whyever did you think I might want to listen to rap/disco/techno at the same time?
  5. You have 3MB of pictures and animations on your home page. My mobile contract charges me £1 per MB. I will warn all my friends about you.
  6. Anyway, it took so long for all that to load I got bored and went somewhere else.
  7. I was going to buy something, but it was in the slideshow thing and went away before I could click on it. That was really annoying, but then I couldn’t find it on your site. Don’t worry, I found it on Amazon. By the way, Amazon really know about online retail, if that slideshow of yours is such a good idea, wouldn’t they have one on every page?
  8. When I clicked on “Prices”, I didn’t get prices. I got a form to fill in so you could phone me with your sales pitch. Guess what.
  9. Frankly, although your web site was beautiful, I still don’t have a clue what you really do nor how it might benefit me.
  10. 404.  Need I say more. Sometimes they happen, but when it is your privacy page, your terms and conditions or a product I’m gone.

Coffee Break Web Site Check Up

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Five minutes break, why not use it to be nice to your web site.

  1. Check your page titles and descriptions

    To do this use Google’s site: search parameter e.g. site:colneistechnology.co.uk This gives you a list of pages on your site which are in Google’s index. Take a look at the page links and the descriptions beneath. What kind of message do they give prospective customers? These are the first thing that a high percentage of new  visitors to your site will see. If they are irrelevant, or worse, gibberish, maybe it is time you spent some time editing your page titles and meta descriptions.

  2. See your site as Google does

    Google is a machine. The beautiful design of your web site means as much to it as it does to your office vacuum cleaner. Google can’t read either, instead it does a very sophisticated analysis of the text on your pages. To get an idea of what food you are feeding to it try iwebtool’s spider_view. If what you see doesn’t make sense, chances are Google hasn’t a clue what it is about either. So what is needed? The text that Google sees needs to be the same as people see – and it has to make coherent sense. Don’t try to spam Google with keywords, it doesn’t work.

  3. Get Local

    Remember when Yellow Pages was a big fat book? Take a look at Google Places and see the future of local search. If you want Google to deliver traffic to your web site, it is time you made friends with Google and told it what is special about your business. Many businesses are already listed, for example, if you are in Thomson Local, you are probably already there. But if you haven’t already done so, go and claim your business listing so you can take advantage of a range of free premium features like photos and videos, custom categories, parking details and coupons. Google Places is tightly integrated into the main Google search results – a search for a town plus a product or service yields a real list of localised results, not the pages of ads for national companies you used to see on Yell. So before you take that last sip of coffee, go claim your listing.