Stallion Responsive Theme v8.1 SEO Performance Update

Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

The development version of Stallion Responsive v8.1 is running on this website as of July 7th 2014.

V8.1 isn’t ready for release yet (plan for the end of the month) and most of the changes so far are backend, for example the Color Theme CSS File Creator in v8.1 no longer requires any copying and pasting to create the CSS files and the backup PHP files. Upon clicking Save changes the two files are automatically saved with the correct filenames into the Stallion Responsive child theme folder and are automatically used by Stallion.

Which means if you like the Stallion color scheme I’m using now, but want to make half a dozen color and or font size changes, rather than messing around with CSS editors and FTP it’s a handful clicks of the mouse and the end result would have the exact same functionality you see now with your new colors/fonts.

Have rebuilt the responsive menu code. The v8.0 menu uses 4 javascript files to create the resized mobile responsive menu, in v8.1 ZERO javascript files are required. It’s around 125kb of javascript files no longer loaded by Stallion/WordPress which results in a website loading faster. There are small changes to how it looks and acts and it won’t work correctly on a mobile device running Internet Explorer 8: my understanding is no mobile devices run under IE8, so shouldn’t be an issue.

Have fixed almost all tap size issues related to User Experience as measured by Google PageSpeed Insights Tool. There are still edge cases, for example if you use the Tag cloud and have a tag with not many characters (3 letters for example) the link is small and makes it harder to tap on a mobile device. The extreme would be any link with one letter, I can’t code a theme to take into account the webmaster adding single letter text links, requires enormous fonts: see the Previous and Next paginated links that include numbers 1, 2, 3 … (paginated comments, multiple page categories…) you’ll note the text is large, that’s the minimum font size not to trip the Google tap size warnings. We would not want the smallest tag links or links we’ve added to content to have fonts that size!

The changes to pass the tap size tests means some font sizes are bigger and there’s much bigger padding/margins around elements that can be clicked. When you switch from Stallion Responsive 8.0 to 8.1 your text content will change, this is to pass the mobile device tap size tests which Google might use as a ranking factor.

Added the ability to embed YouTube videos directly into comments without having to either use a plugin or use the correct embed video code: paste a YouTube URL and the core WordPress embed function that works with Posts and Pages works with comments.

Working on new page templates, created one that uses a widget area not used by other parts of Stallion, first example is a WordPress post loading Stallion Responsive Video Tutorials. This is a cool concept for page templates with unique widget areas that I plan to expand on.

As a WordPress theme/plugin developer what I like best about the Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Package is how I can mesh different features together into one awesome WordPress package. The new page template I’ve used for the YouTube Videos tutorial page wouldn’t work anywhere near as well if Stallion didn’t include a YouTube RSS Feed Widget, the Custom Templates Plugin feature (page templates can be used on posts: WordPress core limits page templates to Pages ONLY!) and the Display Widget feature (show/hide widgets on specific posts/pages/sections of a site). Wouldn’t be able to easily create a video page without those features in one package.

Fixed some small bugs as well, nothing major.

Much more work to do, plan to create some more color schemes to add to the current 40 Stallion Responsive color schemes.

Although I doubt I’ll find a solution going to look for another way to generate the Facebook like and share buttons and the Google+ button and some of the other social media buttons because they have NOT been built with performance in mind and have a negative performance impact.

David