Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package I’m working through the Stallion Responsive code and features looking for performance improvements, it’s taken over 5 years to build this SEO package and performance per se wasn’t always a major factor in whether to add/create a feature.

For example today I would seriously think twice before adding an image slider feature like the ones I added a few years ago because of the performance hit using jquery etc… Where before it was “cool feature, does it damage SEO in a way I can’t fix/tolerate? No, I’ll add that”…

Now it’s “cool feature, does it damage SEO in a way I can’t fix/tolerate? No. Does it have any negative performance issues I can’t fix/tolerate? No, I’ll add that”…

Now with a fancy image feature the goal is to mimic the feature without using javascript (they almost always use jquery). The Stallion Responsive 8.0 mobile menu uses jquery, the 8.1 menu uses no javascript, it looks pretty much the same as 8.0 minus the need for jquery. The menu is relatively easy compared to trying to achieve an interesting feature with an image slider only using CSS.

I’m thinking about the negative impact on the user experience of someone on a smartphone on a slow 3G network: last thing they need is fancy features using jquery.

Still looking for releasing by the end of the month, getting tight though. Think I’m going to wrap up what I’ve done for the 8.1 update and release and work on the rest for the next update. If I don’t I could be making improvements for months which means no one (including me) benefits from the current major improvements.

I’m really enjoying having Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool and their Google Chrome info as well to aim for. A lot of the SEO features added to Stallion are backend that no one ever sees/appreciates (most people won’t understand how important decreasing database queries is), having these firm numbers shows the work a WordPress SEO package developer must go to, to create a truly Google SEO friendly website. It’s a joke when theme developers say a theme is SEO friendly because the title tag is organised with the name of a post first rather than name of the blog or because it has meta tags. Those aren’t SEO features to brag about, it’s along the lines of saying use our airline, our planes have two wings AND air for you to breath :-)

David