Brendan Tully0 Comments
October 9, 2026
How HSTS affects SEO: Google lists it as a canonicalization signal, but Googlebot ignores it, so your 301 redirects still matter.
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Marketing teams add tags and developers get blamed for the slow site. GA4, the Facebook Pixel, ad conversion tags and live chat widgets are some of the heaviest JavaScript on a typical page, and most of them load the moment Google Tag Manager does. Changing when those tags fire is one of the simplest ways…
A “Below average” landing page experience rating in Google Ads is easy to dismiss when every speed test says the site is fast. That is a costly assumption. The speed test and your ad clicks are often not loading the same thing, and the gap between them can quietly raise what you pay per click…
WooCommerce stores publish URLs nobody meant to publish: add to cart links, wishlist links, sort orders, currency switches, internal search results. Crawlers follow all of them. On a modest hosting plan that crawling can overload a store, and in Search Console the same URLs turn up as noise competing with the product and category pages…
A standard YouTube embed is one of the heaviest things you can put on a page. Each one pulls in most of a megabyte of player files before anyone presses play, and a page with several embeds makes the browser work hard enough to spin up a laptop fan. That costs you twice: in the…
“Duplicate without user-selected canonical” sits in the Not indexed section of the Pages report in Google Search Console, so it is easy to file under housekeeping. It deserves more attention than that. It means Google found the same content at more than one URL, saw no canonical tag naming the original, and picked one itself.…
Blocking Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz from your own website sounds odd coming from a search marketing business. It is one of three Cloudflare rules commonly recommended for WordPress sites, alongside blocking XML-RPC and challenging visitors to the login page. All three cut junk traffic and server load. Before you add them, it is worth knowing…
A Lighthouse score tells you how a page performed in one test. Google’s page experience assessment uses something else: field data from real Chrome users, collected in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). The CrUX Dashboard turns that data into a monthly report you can track over time, run against competitors and use as a…
“Alternate page with proper canonical tag” is not an error. Google is telling you it found a duplicate URL, read the canonical tag on it and indexed the page the tag pointed to instead. The system worked. So why bother? Because every URL in that report is a page Google chose to crawl instead of…
Every tool a marketing team adds to a website arrives as a third-party file: Google Analytics, Tag Manager, the Facebook pixel, an opt-in tool, click fraud protection for paid campaigns. Each one makes the page take longer to finish loading, and the person who waits is the visitor who just clicked your ad or your…
Publishers who monetise with Ezoic live with a trade-off: the ads pay the bills, and ad code is heavy. Ezoic’s answer is Leap, a panel of speed settings applied as pages pass through its network. The temptation is to switch everything on. For a site that depends on organic search, that is usually the wrong…
A long list under “Not found (404)” in Google Search Console looks alarming, and plenty of site owners respond by redirecting every URL in it. That usually makes things worse. A 404 is the correct answer for a page that does not exist, and Google expects to see them. The SEO work is in separating…
Every paid click and every organic visit that turns into a sale passes through the WooCommerce checkout. By the time a shopper reaches it, the marketing spend has already happened. If the checkout hangs on shipping calculation or takes several seconds to process the order, that spend is wasted, and none of the usual SEO…
The contact page is where search traffic turns into enquiries, so it is the worst place on a site for friction and the worst place for junk data. Spam submissions make lead numbers look better than they are. A captcha, the usual answer to spam, puts a puzzle in front of the people you most…
If your site runs through Cloudflare, a large part of your technical SEO lives there: DNS, redirects, caching and the firewall rules that decide which crawlers get in. Sooner or later an SEO consultant, developer or agency needs to look at it. The worst way to arrange that is to hand over your own login.…
A run of one dollar orders landing overnight looks like an operations headache, and it is. It is also a marketing problem. Card testing orders flow into the same analytics, conversion tags and bidding systems that decide where your ad budget goes, and some of the fixes can change how search engines reach your store.…
When a WooCommerce dashboard takes ten or twenty seconds to load an order, it feels like a hosting problem. Often part of the cause is search crawlers. Googlebot, SEO tools and scrapers follow add to cart links, wishlist links and internal search URLs, and every one of those requests makes the store do real work.…
Form spam is usually treated as an admin nuisance, but for a business that runs on leads it is a measurement problem. Junk submissions inflate conversion counts, mislead Google Ads bidding and waste sales time. The common fixes create their own problems: captchas slow pages down, and an overzealous firewall can lock out the crawlers…
First Contentful Paint is not one of the three Core Web Vitals, which is why it gets ignored in SEO conversations. That is a mistake. FCP is the first thing a visitor experiences, it feeds directly into Largest Contentful Paint on most sites, and Google records it for every Chrome visitor in the field data…
Most articles about 403 errors are written for the person who cannot get into their own site. This one is about the visitor you never see complaining: Googlebot. When a firewall answers Google with “403 Forbidden”, nothing looks broken in the browser, yet pages start dropping out of the index and rankings erode over weeks.…
The best GTmetrix alternatives for testing site speed, free and paid, and which ones show the Core Web Vitals data Google actually uses.
When a shopper clicks “add to cart”, they’ve already made up their mind. Everything you spent on ads, SEO and product photos has done its job. If the button then spins for five or ten seconds, a lot of those shoppers simply give up, and that’s a sale you paid for and lost at the…
Funnel software, or an automated marketing funnel, is vital for any business looking to make sales. A marketing funnel is exactly what it sounds like: a system that “funnels” people through your sales process until they ultimately convert, typically into paying customers. But you probably already know that if you’re searching for the best funnel…
Creating a WordPress site requires a certain amount of meticulousness – you need to implement a variety of elements for your site to work properly and seamlessly. Caching plugins, security plugins, drag, and drop page builder plugins, live chat plugins, image optimization plugins, eCommerce plugins, you name it! There’s plenty of them to think of…
Since 2016, we’ve optimized more than 4000 sites through our speed optimization WP Speed Fix. and get daily questions about site speed, themes and which theme is the fastest or whether changing themes will speed up a site. In this post we share the fastest WordPress themes we’ve found, including what makes them fast, and…
Mobile responsive websites are a must as we reach the end of the second decade of the new millennia. It’s no wonder, then, that businesses that thrive online have to locate part of their strategies to being readily available, adaptable and fully responsive for mobile devices as well. And this is not only enormously important…
If you’re trying to promote your business online, you probably know that you can’t avoid using pay-per-click advertising. But managing PPC campaigns is not an easy task, as it requires a lot of time and hard work. This is where PPC and Google ads management software and tools come into play. These tools will take…
If you want to take your Shopify store to the next level, having an excellent email marketing solution is a must! After all, email marketing is one of the best ways to convert website visitors into customers, which is why in this article, we’ll review the best email marketing apps and tools for Shopify that…
Email empowers you to connect with people from all over the world, and it is the quickest and most cost-effective means to communicate for business. Online banks, online business platforms, online stores – they all require a valid email for a verifiable connection. A good email hosting provider has become one of the most valuable…
Given you’re on this page I probably don’t need to tell you that fast WordPress loading times are important for SEO, user experience and particularly in ecommerce businesses, conversion rates and sales . We’ve optimized 3000+ sites through our WordPress Speed Optimization Service WPSpeedFix.com and have deep experience with Woocommerce speed and WordPress speed optimization.…
In this article, we’re going to talk about WordPress plugins, and specifically, the one we consider the BEST solution for backing up WordPress sites. Unlike other articles around the web, this is one we’ve used for 5+ years (after trying almost everything on the market) across 1000s of websites: BlogVault We’ve tried pretty much every…
With so many web hosting services to choose from, it’s no wonder that you might be having a hard time choosing the best option for you. Depending on the exact requirements of your company, certain services are going to be much more convenient for you than others. The most common requirement that most companies have,…
Speed is one of the most important components when it comes to the optimization of your website. Fast websites, with a superb, modern front-end website design, will greatly contribute to the success of online business or an online enterprise. Nowadays, the fast-paced environment of the internet demands that apps and tools function at ever-faster speeds,…
There’s a level of skepticism that comes with receiving something for free. In order to put a few speculations to rest right from the start – yes, the paid versions of these themes usually offer a lot more features. That being said, there are definitely some very interesting options that the base versions can provide…
Auditing your website is just one of those crucial elements for a successful online business, but reviewing a website is not an easy task. To accomplish such a complicated procedure, you need to have experience, a keen eye for detail, or ideally both. What’s more, auditing is very time-consuming since you need to go through…
Many companies consider WooCommerce to be an integral part of their site, so it stands to reason that they would want to tailor their site to be better optimized by choosing the right theme. In order to accomplish this, the easiest way is to simply get a theme that can provide all of the necessary…
Regardless of what kind of site you run, loading speeds are a key factor in how many return visitors you’re likely to see. If you run a Shopify focused site, then you’re likely going to have a lot of product details and images that are notoriously slow to render and can really affect the performance…
According to a bunch of different studies online you can lose 7%+ on your conversion rate with each second that your site takes to load. That’s probably just a made-up stat but slow sites do lose visitors and poor site speed does impact conversion rates and checkouts quite dramatically. In this post we break down…
Brendan Tully3 Comments
I’ve been talking to quite a few businesses lately about what they can do differently this year or what other things they should be doing to help them get more customers. In the the video below I’ve shared 2 new ideas that most people haven’t heard of that can be a great way to get…
Most e-commerce websites acquire most of their traffic through Google and other search engines. Obviously, the higher your site appears within the search results, the better. As you might know, SEO optimization is the best way toward the top pages of Google’s (and other search engines’) search results. So, if you’re looking for the best…
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