 Thank you very much. Am I still getting enough audio at the back? Okay, awesome. I was born in Queensland. I might have you know Okay, so I'm gonna talk about 30 WordPress audits that I did in 30 days and the kind of lessons that I've learned but before we get into that I want to find out a Little bit about you guys so who in the room have been exposed to WordPress for less than one year Wow It's a good mix there. How about one to five years? Okay, how about more than five years? Okay, have a look around these are all the people that got trapped here because there's only one track The event sessions are open yet, and they didn't get to the door in time before I started so No, no, there's more pressure on me to get the facts straight than before so bear with me Okay I'm Tony cosentini as you know The WP guy comm.au is where you can find me same with Instagram. It's a little tip You can use your website address as your Instagram name with the dots and everything makes it super easy Facebook's the WP guy right so a little bit of a walkthrough of my Timeline so in 2008 I started an internet communications degree and Logging I think was a subject and WordPress came up. You had to go and find WordPress and install it and At the same time I had a I think a friend of my sister that needed a website for their hairdressing so on and I thought I think I could use WordPress to kind of do this so I just had a go at Setting them up and they loved it and that kind of sparked the beginning of building websites for money So I was I don't know Fun start so 2011 I Decided to ramp it up and I went got on a plane and went to New Zealand to my first word camp and it was just mind-blowing like I had People who work for automatic there. There were people that built plugins there that I'd actually heard of And this great regular community of people as well. It was just all you know amazing. So enjoy thoroughly psyched it up and enjoyed it and then came back to Australia and then went to another word camp that same year in Melbourne and I got up and did a lighting talk on My five favorite plugins. So if you get a chance to a lighting talker, so just to have a go at that too It's a lot of fun. There's no pressure. You can just get up and talk and then in 2012 I decided to speak at Sydney word camp about Every plug and under the Sun that I'd kind of come across and it was a shocker. I'm still getting over that presentation if Please don't go and look at it. It's somewhere online still But because of that, I didn't really get back to doing speaking until last year I've had a lot of post-traumatic stress from that that last one So But I came back here last year and spoke about podcast and using WordPress and I've got some nice feedback and Charlie sitting right here. Enjoyed it. I believe say hi Charlie So here we are today talking about the lessons I've learnt while doing ordering 30 WordPress websites in 30 days Right Something I love about WordPress though just just to inspire anyone that's just new to WordPress is it can give you a lot of things like freedom flexibility financial security time to be a great dad for my kids the The guy on the top left is my oldest and he was on Australia's Got Talent on Sunday is Magic Josh or hot Josh got a nickname and he's he's going to be on again tomorrow night in the semi finals And you may see a cameo appearance from my mohawk. I don't know yet, but I was there Okay, and you get to meet some amazing people in the WordPress community particularly this lovely lady who will be speaking later with Opening and closing word camp for you today Right, so here's 30 common mistakes That are worth noting Right the number I think the number one thing you can do to make your website terrible is get cheap hosting You think you're going to save money you're just starting up you look for the five dollar a month hosting you find it and You start to grow and then you realize that Your email is not working your sites super slow It's sometimes it goes offline you can't get hold of any WordPress any support staff. I really suggest thinking strongly about your hosting it's and later we'll talk about speed, but hostings we can actually Improve your speed the most getting decent hosting the more host the more people on a hosting account Cheap hosting the more people that are fighting for the same server processing speed and There's lots of great hosting options outside some of which of you I use so talk to them now When I was ordering these sites, there's a lot of people that had The defaults time zone set in their settings It's under the general settings. I think and You can you can select not only you know plus 10 for Brisbane But you could select your city so that if you're in a state that has daylight savings It will automatically adjust to the daylight savings time It's kind of important to know when comments come through when you want to post something ahead of like Schedule a post that it comes out at the right time. So that's just an easy one to get right that people often miss your permanent settings I Still found a few websites that had The deep the old default WordPress Permalix setting and the question about vehicles one two three doesn't roll off the tongue when trying to share a link to somebody Now my favorite is post name, but I know that people that build Silo's of content prefer to have category and then post name Which is also a good strategy and it doesn't affect Standard pages still come up as their page name And if you've got if you're really making a category is your blocks of content that you want to promote Then you can use category post same as well Okay How many people know about this setting How many people have never heard of this discouraged search engines from indexing a site anyone not heard of it good I've got I've looked at websites someone paid $30,000 for Three months previously and that setting was still set to discourage search engines It's so easy to miss because you when you're building a site you want to hide it from Google at the time and It's forgotten to switch back right Hello, Dolly is a great plug-in to show you how plugins are structured But and I think Matt one of my own work actually His name's on it. I don't know whether he wrote wrote it, but it it doesn't need to be there Right, it's just a plug-in. It's sitting there doing nothing that you can Delete right to tighten up your your plugins And honestly I found probably about 25% of the website still had it sitting there Too many plugins right so this opening comments where that I one of the websites I come across had a hundred plugins It really did have a hundred plugins The scariest part was only 50 of them were active So So there are like a hundred attack vectors for hackers to kind of look for weak points to get into the website So have a real think about what plugins you use And there's lots of options too anyway like some themes have options that you didn't realize that can replace a plug-in and I know we're going to probably talk about Gutenberg today, but if you've got a visual builder Theme and and you kind of want to switch off the Gutenberg blocks to sort of let you just use that visual builder tool in that For building your content a lot of them now have introduced a setting which you can enter classic editor mode Automatically without needing the plug-in that you can get to do that So there's little things you can do to kind of streamline your plug-in Collection right sit back to that 50 inactive plugins of that that website had if you've got inactive plugins Don't be a hoarder Right, don't you don't have to I know they're really really handy. You never know when you might need it but if they're in the plug-in directory you can Install it you can search for it install it down the track when you need it Don't just have it sitting there just in case on a rainy day. You might want it, right? Old themes was a really common one to have every default WordPress theme since the website was built You don't need To have every version of WordPress the WordPress theme sitting in there or themes that you've tried and decided that you You're going with a particular one Have one theme as a fallback so you can deactivate your main theme if you have Real issues to try and fault find so 2019 I'd suggest having that because it's the most current Less chance of having having bugs and issues and things so don't have a theme grave out in your website child themes How many people don't have a child theme on their website? It's not too bad. I know that the case now is that you can use custom CSS And you don't need to have a child thing But one day you might want to add some functions to the website and there's also plugins for that But it's kind of cleaner to have a child theme to add custom CSS to to add functions and There's a couple of plugins that are really good to do that. There's Child theme wizard which you can use to create a child theme. What my favorite is the child theme configurator at the moment because it will Analyze the theme that you want to make a child theme from and it will tell you whether it's compatible with making a child theme and it will also Copy your things like your menu and footer settings across to the child theme So you don't have to go and reallocate the main menu stuff like that We're thinking about Right, so I couldn't believe it that these websites with serious websites that I looked at that were commercial for commercial use and They were definitely a revenue generator and a lot didn't have backup running they are that Had no backup Plug-in install whatsoever or they had it in stalls and they had one backup for when the website was built and nothing since You need to do regular backups Preferably on a weekly basis, but it really depends if you don't move your content around don't change your content depends when you do updates and when you do Content updates and plug-in updates and things like that. So have a regular update Schedule and there's plenty of options out there. My favorite at the moment is WP updraft plus It's a free plug-in on the wordpress.org repository It allows scheduling it allows off-site backup so you can send copies of the backup to Amazon S3, which is my favorite off Off-site storage option take there's a little bit of pain initially to set that up, but it's worth it It's very economical. You you can use Dropbox. I think Dropbox has funny things happen once you get over a certain size So so I found Amazon S3 the most reliable right No security Now I Know people who start out think why would anyone care about my website? It's just starting up. It's it's nothing It's well. There's no reason to come and hack my site but I've had sites that were quite new and They were hacked and they were a South African bank was set up in place of them because a soft site is easy to use by hackers to use other things fishing Things like that. So if you make your site slightly harder to access than the next wordpress site Then they'll just move on to the softer targets and you'll avoid the trouble. So Word fences are popular plug-in for that. I really like WP All-in-one security. I think it's called It's kind of lighter a bit lighter but still quite effective so caching if you've if you're a programmer and you can Custom make all the code for your theme from the ground up. You probably have a very slick fast site you probably don't even think about caching but These days we're using lots of tools themes with visual editors and lots of these 50 plugins so caching can save you a lot of grief and There's plenty of options around there's paid there's free options as paid options You just search with wordpress caching that you'll find there's a number about that But it's worth it's one of the foundation things you should consider having in every site contact forms I'm sure everyone here's got a contact form How many people have contact forms how many people don't have contact forms that do not save entries No one's gonna put the hand up up the issue is you've Created a website you've done marketing people have come to found you they've come to your website They've looked at your site They said yes, I think I do want to Work with this person they go to your contact form. They've got go to the trouble of filling in the hit send and then after that point Things happen Websites often lose an email on the way out That can be an issue with the mail exchanger of the hosting or a setting that doesn't work Your email account might have a problem There's so many factors that can lose that email between the send and your inbox And you've just lost this critical leave when if you if you Allow your website to save copies of the forms at least you've got a fallback You can go back on a regular basis and go oh the form and I've seen I've seen it happen That's happened when a percentage of emails have just not made it out so Obviously gravity forms is a is a plug-in that everyone's heard of that's a paid Option but that you can find some of the free plugins out there that have add-ons that will Make them save copies in the database so Do some research and have a look for those if you're not up for paying for a paid tool I think you can leverage free tools if you write combine a standard contact plug-in with a An add-on that creates database entries Okay on your form You need to also think about how many fields you're making the person fill in too many fields as It says there reduces the completion rate by 50 percent every field you add you want to ask them. I don't know How they found you's probably important to have but there's other questions that you may want to avoid I Have a short contact form for the initial contact and then I've got longer forms for different tasks I've someone wants a website built I'll send them a different to a different form that has much more detail because we've already started the conversation and they're prepared For it. They're prepared to take some more time, but the initial contact. We're trying to get that initial spark Keep it keep it as easy as possible for them slow sites now I can remember being and being in a talk when I think it was seven seconds Three seconds is the new seven seconds So if you want to talk about how fast your site is you're aiming for three seconds now I Literally watched my site go from Six seconds to three seconds just by changing hosting now both hosted in Australia, but The new option was just the Rolls-Royce of hosting which are outside today Okay images Now this is again talking about the speed situation It was very common when I was looking at these sites to find thousand pixel images sitting in 250 pixel boxes around the page Right, so it's don't think about that think of try and work out with Google Chrome. You can right-click and get Image sizes off the Page and just see what size The pay the images are being rendered and then create an image that size and that's step one Then the file size of those images is still normally bigger than it should be I'll by the way the three-second rule on the previous slide tiny Pingdom commas where you can benchmark how fast your website is that's a good place to do speed checks so back to the images so What Tiny png.com is a great service. It's free. You can click and drag 10 or 20 images up to there at once And it will reduce them down to the minimum file size whether the pngs or jpegs without Losing any quality so to give you the most efficient image you can get And that will help your page load speed so I'm to get this three seconds kind of going How many people here use Yoast for SEO as an SEO tool? How many people here use something else? Okay, so there's a percentage and I respect that I used to use other seo plugins too, but it's it's kind of the common seo tool these days So if you haven't got one I'd seriously recommend having a look at it. It's free. It's well supported There's lots of people that know about how to use it, but the next step is Don't leave it in the default setup Because it generates site maps of things that you don't necessarily need like not every website once authors to be in a site a group of that's indexed by Google or Sometimes images projects is a very common Tool that is part of a lot of themes these days and People aren't using them anyway So there's no point creating a site map or letting Google try and index something called projects when it's not there So and also your social media accounts. I found a lot of Sites that had Yoast installed hadn't put their social media accounts into the setting for social and the Yoast settings so that's worth Considering to Analytics It's a really important thing to do and you might think I'll get the website build and then I'll get to the analytics And I've actually had a quite a few people who didn't have analytics set up because I thought they were Still on an early stage, but really you want your data from day one if you can To show the growth and to see who came to your website in the beginning and how it's evolved and you need to know If you don't know what traffic's come to your site. What are you gonna? How are you gonna you know grow your business you need to know these things so get get Google analytics set up and then I'd say about 90% of the sites that I looked at their Google analytics account even though they'd moved to HTTPS They had not changed their Google analytics property settings to HTTPS So I bet you there's at least more than 50% of people here with it in that scenario So common SSL certificates. I'm trying to think of when how many years ago that we that the pendulum really swung towards HTTPS I think it's it's just so the norm now and you'll find if you if you are still running on HTTP That your web hosting is probably providing you with a free SSL certificate through let's encrypt or something like that and it could even In a lot of cases when I looked at the websites, it was already active and they you just needed to then Change your settings to HTTPS and there's some other steps you need to do to go and find references to HTTPS But it's not impossible to do. It's worth it's worth doing Because you'll get left behind 95% of the websites had HTTPS Okay Google search console was often missed often people were happy to have Google analytics set up They had their WordPress logins, but they didn't have a girl's have Google search console set up if you can take the time to do it with using DNS settings because Google so Google is allowed you to do this now It captures all the variations of your website whether there's WWW and it HTTPS and what sort of stuff the Domain level is the best way to do it and then once you've got it set up I found a lot of the sites had installed Yoast and they hadn't Submitted the Yoast sitemap to the to Google search console. So remember to Do that too In the in the yo settings there is an area. I think it's it's where it lists all the features that you've got in Yoast There's a section that says sitemap XML and there's you you literally can click on a link Which will show you the sitemap reference and then get that and put that into your Google search console Make sure the admin email address is The one that you want to get regular updates from Google search console I think usually it's turned on to send you updates, but check that it Is turned on and check that you've got the right email address connected because a lot of you will use a Gmail address to set up Google search console because it's quick and easy, but Now you can connect your regular business email address to Google and then add that as an email account as well so that it's in your main inbox So you don't miss it because you don't always check your Gmail as much as your your commercial your business email right H1s we're getting on to the content area now H1s commonly we use to make statements down the page Because they like the fact that the H1s were nice and big and bold But from a content perspective, it's kind of confusing. You know, you know write an essay and say my say about this and then Halfway down you put another heading of the same magnitude as the first one about a really a subheading So think about that apparently it's not as John Miller says that it's not as important to your Google juice as it used to be But it's still good practice. You see assess to adjust your h2 settings to Be larger if you want to use prominent headings and I found that commonly and some Themes actually for some bizarre reason that comment heading was h1 by default So you've got to look at your theme and sometimes as it issues with that Which you would then use the child thing that I mentioned to fix you can you can sort out issues like that with your child theme How many people's phone numbers are clicked to call how many people's phone numbers are not clicked to call on the website? Right, so we've entered the mobile first era It's so common now It's painful to try and click on that number select the Exact amount of text go into your phone up and paste it in and you know when you really just want to push that number and go to your phone Calling section and all you have to do is put tel colon and then the number just like you do with an ah Normal link except instead of HTTPS you put tel if you want to have spaces in the way that the numbers displayed on the phone Put dashes in between if you put an actual space in those numbers I think you'll have an issue or put the whole number in as one continuous number to it was so common like so common on the websites that I looked at and You know, it's slowing people down. It's it's not making it as easy to get hold of you Okay, so How many people have got e-commerce sites? Yep, think about whether you've got terms and conditions and Terms of service on your website because I think it's Australian law that you meant to Take so and a lot of clients That I looked at didn't have that so you're kind of flying blind. You're kind of breaking some rules There's there's plenty of services out there to help you do that WordPress has got Some templates to help you do your privacy settings So think about that from a commercial perspective Basic architecture now, I guess it's it's kind of everyone's got an opinion about this, but Don't don't get creative with him with your navigation. It's meant to be boring. It's meant to be easy to get to It's meant to get get people to where they need to go. Don't say Ask us ask us about or something instead of contact, you know, just get to it Cards what's wrong with card? What what are we need bag now? Like I Think it's other softwares probably using we're trying to copy them. Let's stick to our guns. We started with car 10 second rule in 10 seconds If I looked at any of your websites, what I would I know who you were what you do Who you do it for and why you're better than anyone else at it? 10s do you think you could communicate that in 10 seconds or would you have to read for three minutes to find out that you I Don't know a great architect So think about your messaging make it punch you make it happen in the 10 seconds How many people here are not do not have a Google my business set up? You've all got Google my business. So if I went and search for your website right now, okay? Can I get your website up on up on the screen? No, I won't do it to you It's you're missing an opportunity. It's a land grab right now Hurry up and do it people want to search for you in your locality You're going to come up first if you've got a Google my business page. It's like 15 minutes of your life Do it? It's so worth doing That's 30 Now I want to say this at these conferences by tomorrow the people sitting here will be really chilled relaxed You've got to know other people around the community Can we have the five plus WordPress people stand up for me, please more than five years These are the these are the WordPress veterans right and annoyed a conference. You were scared of them and They're and in other conferences they're standoffish hard to talk to Clicky blah blah blah these people the opposite of that right they're friendly they want to help you They've got lots of knowledge they Built up over the years Talk to them early talk to them early. Don't wait till tonight for drinks talk to them today and Build that start building their friendship early. That's what I want to say Questions anyone good. I'm gonna keep on time If you want to find me here I am the wp guy.com. Do you okay? We can have about two questions If you've got a question, we'd like to we'd ideally like you to come down to the mic rather than having someone come and run to the mic Okay, come on down to the mic. I'll run it. I'll run it up to them Actually that'll fix stuff up the live stream, sorry You recommend updraft plus for Backups, yeah, I use updraft plus and I'll back up on a weekly basis to Amazon S3 Yeah, yeah problem. I have with it. It also stores the backup on the website itself. How can I avoid that? Does it doesn't have that setting doesn't to delete after after sending No, you're just gonna do housekeeping. I know You can tell it how many backups to keep on your on your in general in the on the settings page I usually do it about 10 just in case yeah And but then again it I've had 400 backups stored there at times I think there's a setting that you can set how many copies it keeps in general Yeah, I can't work out where to put it where to set it It's at the it's at the very top when you go to settings that says do weekly monthly daily, whatever and right next to that It says how many yeah, and I said that but it still still stores them still stores it And then when I delete it from the website also deletes it from S3 Yeah, I don't I don't know the answer to that Okay Do you know something about that cron job if you if you can do cron jobs I Couldn't advise you on cron jobs The updraft class people are also really handy So if you log a help ticket, they'd usually respond usually about 48 hours But they usually quite good and I'll get back to you to help and I've backed up sites that were unback up of all on paid backup software with W up draft plus. It's so good at backing up hard sites and big sites Particularly for a remote storage. I've had issues with get sending remote copies up to our plus batches it really well Yeah, sorry Tony. Yeah, so you're run your sort of Send like a pretty good on Yoast SEO. Have you tried all in one SEO and do you that's the look That's that's historical. That's an historical SEO tool That's like one of the first ones that are used Yeah I use both and I find each has sort of they have their own quirks The thing that is it interests me though that is Yoast is working with Google on a regular basis So they're a bit a bit more cutting edge and yes, sometimes they do things that break almost break the Yoast setting the SEO Settings, but they fix it pretty quickly with the automatic updates So It's really it's like it's almost like beat a max and VHS like it's to me. It's like yeah Yoast is kind of the the primary these days for me There was there was some other ones I use as well, but yeah Yo Is there one website that comes to your mind? Regardless of the industry or whatever but something one or two websites that come to your mind right now that you can say people This is what a website should be like Who would that be? Besides yours Tony's got a good website if you haven't seen it yet All in one recipe for success all in one SEO recipe for success is one Elegant themes is the other Elegant themes.com Hello, I'm wondering like is there any optimal number of Plugins that you would like to limit yourself. No in terms of installation. No Because they're all different some are bulky and use a lot of resources and some are lean and don't it doesn't matter You could have you could have 50 lean plugins that are really well-coded wouldn't matter, but you can have five heavy Sluggish plugins that create problems. So no, it just comes down to how good the plugin is look at how many downloads there are Look at how regularly it's updated look at who's Supporting that plug-in whether it's a lone developer who's at uni that's going to get bored in a couple of years or whether it's a It's got a company behind it that are going to fund regular updates That are prepared to kind of keep community check on the latest versions of WordPress to keep it current So it's really about the pedigree of the plug-in not the quantity Yeah, and definitely not a hundred Well, I'm conscious of the time so I know that Tony is going to be around in the the tea breaks and the lunches and things So he's definitely somebody that you can have a yarn to ask questions of Get on to his website and his Insta and chase him down and ask questions And I still do those health checks for not only clients, but for developers So if you want a sanity check of what you've done before you sort of send it on your way I do it for do that service for developers to yeah And I've noticed that there is that you can actually buy one of his health checks from his actual website You can click and purchase so it's very handy to have a second set of eyes So I'd like you to join me in thanking Tony for sharing a whole lot of wisdom