Yoast: Been saying this for years: The “New” SEO Secret Weapon http://t.co/TkpAVjpj via @copyblogger 
Site Speed tracking in Google Analytics
Just a quickie: I just updated my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin to incorporate the new Site Speed tracking feature that Google announced last week. The feature is on by default and can be disabled in the advanced section of the settings. As you can see from the announcement post, this new feature helps you [...]
Killer Performance Tips from the Expert
My business & podcast partner Frederick Townes, who also happens to be the CTO @ Mashable.com, has finally finished a long awaited (by me at least) post covering lots of the performance tips he’s applied at Mashable (I hope you’ve seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having [...]
Site Speed is now a Ranking Factor
Just wanted to jot down a quick blog post with my thoughts about two blog posts about speed. Matt Cutts has been writing both on his own blog and on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog to tell everyone what we knew was coming: site speed is now an official ranking factor. Now I want [...]
CSS Image Replacement, what’s up Matt?
So I’m a big fan of CSS image replacement, for several reasons, most importantly because it allows for a semantically correct page while having some text replaced with images, but also because I love sprites and I love using them well. I’ve also always been in favor of the use of CSS Image Replacement for [...]
Magento performance hosting
The system requirements of Magento are quite extensive, it requires at least PHP 5.2.0 extended with mcrypt, PDO_MySql and simplexml. For the database Magento needs at least MySQL 4.1.20 with InnoDB storage engine. At MagentoCommerce.com you can find a complete list of requirements. But how do you know if your server meets these system requirements? [...]
Optimizing WordPress database performance
I’ve been working with a plugin that was mentioned on the wp-hackers list last week, called debug queries, to optimize the performance on some of my sites, including this one. The plugin was pretty easy to use, and I’ve improved a bit on it. I’ve sent the patch to Frank, who authored the original plugin, [...]
CDN for WordPress: using MaxCDN
Yoast.com uses MaxCDN. When I started using their service, the speed improvement was mind boggling. Before, I could only get the front page of this site to load in about 3-4 seconds, measured by Pingdom, (check your site here). Now, the front page loads in less than a second: You’ll want to know how I did [...]
Lowering the Price for Site Analyses
I’ve made a pretty drastic change this morning in a manner that I normally do not do. I usually only raise my rates and never lower them. However, I’ve significantly lowered the rates of my website review this morning, going from €750 to €495. Why I made this change? Simple: I wanted the site analysis, [...]
Managed WordPress Hosting
Sometimes you can’t be bothered to do upgrades for a WordPress site yourself. You need to be 100% sure that it’s up, that critical updates are done immediately as they come available and that uptime is close to 100%. That’s when you need managed WordPress hosting (as opposed to cheaper but less guaranteed normal WordPress [...]
VPS.net issues: what’s up and what will they do about it?
When I posted my interview with Terry Myers about cloud hosting, I wasn’t really prepared for the backlash that would come in on that post. Quite a few people responded and a lot of them weren’t too happy. On top of that, there were several instances of downtime in both the AMS and several US [...]
Google Analytics WordPress
Track your WordPress site easily in Google Analytics and add lots of data, for example views per author & category and automatic tracking of outbound clicks, pageviews & downloads.
