Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Reviews by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive SEO Theme Yes the Stallion Responsive SEO Package replaces the Genesis theme framework and has a much better performance SEO metric.

Stallion Responsive like Genesis is a theme framework (a WordPress Theme). On a WordPress site you can only activate one WordPress Theme, so if you activate Genesis you can’t activate Stallion Responsive as well and conversely if you activate Stallion Responsive you can’t activate Genesis as well.

WordPress plugins are different, unless a plugin has been developed specifically for a particular theme it should work with any theme. If you have Genesis only plugins they probably won’t work with Stallion Responsive, but others should.

Every WordPress plugin is unique, so some will work better with particular themes, impossible to say all your plugins will work as you expect with Stallion Responsive.

The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin for example has a few features that interfere with Stallion SEO features related to the Stallion SEO Super Comments feature (turns your comments into Google entry points = more traffic). I’ve incorporated the Yoast SEO data into Stallion Responsive, so your Yoast title tags and meta descriptions etc… work with Stallion Responsive without using Yoast, depending on how you use Yoast (I’ve not added the plugin to the package, just used the same database names for SEO data so Stallion uses Yoast data) you might be able to drop it.

Stallion actually use the Yoast SEO data for more than just the title tags, so switching to Stallion Responsive means better SEO from the Yoast SEO data than using Yoast with Genesis (or any theme for that matter). In the process of incorporating even more Yoast data into Stallion Responsive 8.2 (next update).

The Genesis Theme Framework generates some really nice looking WordPress sites with nice features, BUT has practically no performance measures (or SEO features for that matter) as is shown by your websites Google PageSpeed Insights Results : http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.winnipeghomefinder.com%2F&tab=mobile

Mobile Speed 36/100
User Experience 99/100
Desktop 46/100

Those are really bad performance results, when I ran it it lists Server Response Time at 1.3 seconds, that’s awful, you will be loosing visitors and Google rankings due to that lag if it’s like that most of the time especially on mobile devices.

The Yoast site (develops the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin) results which also uses Genesis isn’t much better: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoast.com%2F

My site running Stallion Responsive http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstallion-theme.co.uk%2F significantly better, almost maxed out without turning features off.

Look at your “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” issues, you have 20 files that are either render-blocking or not asynchronous loaded!!! It’s even worse on your posts, you have 43 files that are either render blocking or not loaded asynchronously!!! I think that’s the worst I’ve ever seen on a site!

Looking through your head code (top of your code that loads various resources) it’s 233 lines of code, that’s huge!

Looks like it’s a case of you’ve worked on the principle you find a nice feature and add it without considering performance at all.

You’ll note my website is relatively clean, every feature is analysed for it’s performance hit relative to how important a feature is. For example do I add a nice flashy image slider feature that research has shown visitors tend to ignore at the cost of adding huge jquery scripts to run it (like you have on your site)? I’ve gone with no, not worth the performance hit.

The Stallion Responsive SEO Package includes a lot of performance SEO measures, but if you run the package with dozens of flashy features it will pull your performance down. Analyse every feature and decide how important it is and if it’s worth the SEO hit. For example you have three ways to post comments, do you need 3 ways? You have 5 ways to Google+ 1 an article, do you need 5?

I don’t have a performance SEO service, I offer free support for the SEO package via the comments here.

Can I suggest setting up a test site and trying the SEO package for free in demo mode. Download Stallion Responsive and run in Demo mode to test the full package, the main options reset every 1,000 pageviews giving time to try it out. Will give you a very good idea if the SEO package is for you.

David