Comment on WordPress SEO Tutorial by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO I wouldn’t read too much into Alexa speed ratings, I don’t think they are very accurate.

WordPress is an advanced content management system (CMS) with a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, unless you pay a lot of money for the best server/hosting available it’s going to be difficult to get a WordPress site (any site running a complex CMS) to be super fast.

I have sites with a decent amount of traffic that are not running WordPress. This one https://classic-literature.co.uk/ is about as simple as one of my older sites get, it’s not basic HTML, but it’s not far off basic HTML. The only scripting it uses is PHP includes, that’s it, the includes are to break the sites template into bits (header, content, footer) and will have little impact on resources used compared to if each page was one HTML document. The main site uses no database (there’s a small section of the site that’s WordPress, barely 10% of the pages and 5% of the traffic), it’s a very basic setup. the main site has hardly any images as well

That site is listed by Alexa : Slow (2.731 Seconds), 61% of sites are faster.

That’s total BS, it’s one of my fastest loading websites.

My recipe site https://free-recipes.co.uk/ is on the same server (cheap Godaddy virtual server) runs on WordPress and has 65,000 posts, runs with Stallion 6 with a reasonable number of plugins, many Stallion features turned on (an average sort of WordPress/Stallion setup).

That site is listed by Alexa : Fast (1.422 Seconds), 64% of sites are slower.

I’d take those numbers with a very large pinch of salt.

Search Google for “Website Speed Test” and try a few of the free tools to see how fast your site loads. When I checked your site it was taking around 1 second to load, which is similar to my sites some of which are listed fast by Alexa and others slow. Check Google.com in Alexa, does that make sense?

Those tools don’t check embedded content (videos, images etc…) and it’s important to optimise your images etc… If you are uploading a lot of images that are 1mb each say and loading 10 of them on the home page, it’s going to significantly slow a site (I had a quick look at your site, didn’t see an issue).

The WordPress permalink setup issue is something I know about, but as far as I’m aware haven’t experienced because I don’t create many Static Pages. I don’t know how much of a slow down the perfect SEO permalink structure generates, strongly suspect on the average site it’s tiny (when I researched this those who understand database queries better than I do said it was minimal), I would worry if I had sites with hundreds of Static Pages. I created the Stallion site knowing about the potential slow down and went with the perfect SEO WordPress permalinks. One poorly thought out WordPress plugin is going to cause far more problems than perfect SEO permalinks, I’ve run across a few plugins that have added several seconds onto loading time!

You are using at least two SEO damaging WordPress plugins I wouldn’t recommend anyone using, remove them and it’s less resources used:

All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin : this adds noindex meta tags to pages and they damage a sites SEO. You can generate your own unique meta descriptions (post excerpts) that Stallion will use as a meta description. the only other useful feature of that plugin is more control over post titles, I always name my posts in a way that the titles don’t need editing. Meta keywords tags have no SEO value at all in Google (I no longer use them), the meta description tag has no SEO ranking value in Google (won’t get you a better listing), the description if used might increase click through (I let Google decide what’s a good description for a page, but Stallion does use the custom excerpt).

Yoast Robots Meta WordPress plugin: this adds nofollow and noindex meta tags to pages and they damage a sites SEO. that’s an anti-SEO WordPress plugin!

I’m working on the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin that can noindex pages like many of these so called WordPress SEO Plugins offer, but without deleting/wasting link benefit. Should release the plugin in a week or two.

You are currently wasting loads of link benefit by nofollowing your tag archives for example! On your home page you have around 20 nofollow links, that’s like linking out to 20 random sites with no SEO benefit in return. Do you do reciprocal links, would you ever give out 20 home page links without anything in return? Using those WordPress plugins without understanding them is that bad SEO wise!

David