SEO Guide:

Use Google search console:

Use Google PageSpeed Insights:

Wordpress sites:

When on the admin portal:

Settings > Reading > Discourage search engines from indexing this site

Uncheck this when you want Google to find your site. Should only be unchecked on the production version of the site.

Also for wordpress sites:

Download Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin by The WordPress.org community.

Some commonly recommended moves:

Reduce unused CSS:

For a customer project there really should not be much unused CSS. When using a framework like Wordpress, it is easier for extra creep to show up. Recommend getting off any base WP css.

Serve images in next-gen formats:

Use WebP and AVIF - when using Wordpress, you will want to do the conversion before uploading the image's to the media collection on the wp-admin page. That way, you will get all the resized images in the proper format.

Properly size images

Figure out which sized version of the image should be used & avoid using full sized images. Can be useful, but I hesitate to do this on LFSD - we are showing a larger version of the image when it is clicked on, and I don't want another version of the image to be loaded at that point.

Eliminate render-blocking resources

Figure out what css needs to be loaded immediately & only have those as render blocking resources. Try to keep as small as possible.

Enable text compression

Alot easier when running on one of our own servers.

Assuming we are using & have control over Apache server:

Make sure deflate & filter modules are on: `apachectl -M | grep deflate` `apachectl -M | grep filter` If not, un comment this line in httpd.conf: #LoadModule deflate_module libexec/apache24/mod_deflate.so

There should already be a gzip.conf, which you include in the desired vhosts.

Document does not have a meta description

If Wordpress: First, navigate to Admin > Setting > General > Tagline