• Keeping track of images in the media folder is important. Check proper naming & compression of images & size before uploading
• include company name & purpose of image (your company name – blog – blog title – aspect ratio) ie: 1600×900 / 1280×800 / 500×500
• Placing them in the correct media directory folder, also helps you find that image again
• Image naming helps search engines understand what the image is about which helps rank your company in image search results
• Don’t use oversized files ie: they must be compressed correctly before upload OR it will have an adverse effect on your overall search engine rankings
• Big images slow down your site you will get marked down in search results
• As they say ‘one size fits all’ well that’s rubbish on a website it needs the right size image to fit the design layout
• Image copyright if your not sure that it’s a public domain image then don’t use it

• Yes we know these things take time & effort but cutting corners has never really worked for anyone
• Please stay to best practices it will help promote your business 10 fold for such a little bit of effort
• your website is the main interaction point with clients, if it looks rushed & unkempt, what type of business message are you giving out

• That over 80% of website visitors will first view your site from a mobile device
• When you upload an image the background system creates 4 > 6 other sizes of that image
• If you embed a YouTube video on page, that during the page load process the web browser actually goes off to ask YouTube if that video is still available, before in completes the page load
• Google fonts used on a site, during the page load process the web browser goes off to ask Google if that font is available, before it loads the page
• All those nice icons you see, yes you guessed it during page load it goes off to check they are available
• Using the term ‘click here’ gets search results over 17 Billion, search robots don’t have eye’s they need descriptive linked text in context to the content
• Getting your site verified for Google Business Listing they actually send you a post card via snail mail. That can take 4 > 6 weeks

• CPT’s > Custom Post Types (grouped content)
• Posts & Pages > actually the same thing they are both a type of CPT
• Shortcodes > used for repetitive text/data ie: delivery terms. We write it once, you just type [delivery-terms] in the page
• Frontend > the front face of your website
• Sitemap > the file that search engine’s use to provide an index of your site for SEO
• Backend > the admin interface for you
• Plugin > addition software tool that adds improved or essential functionality
• Yoast/Rank Math > used for improving SEO results
• PPC > Pay Per Click for ads
• Hosting > the space your website lives in
• Domain name > your internet address
• IP > the actually set of numbers for your website
• DNS > Domain Name Server acts as the internet’s “phonebook,” translating human-readable domain names to numbers, it’s quicker for systems to process numbers
• 404 > a page that tells a visitor that a page has moved (ask us to show you)
• 303 > a page redirect solution
• Templates > design layouts for pages, posts & CPT’s
• Archive > a collection of CPT items grouped on a page ie: your services / products
• Single Template > the design layout for single CPT item
• Pagespeed > used by search engines to assess the time it takse to load your website to a visitor, slow loading sites get marked down in search results, we aim for under 2.5 seconds
• Slider > a selection of moving images at the top of a page/post really bad for SEO & page speed
• Hero > normally the image at the top of the page

Don’t create multiply pages across your site us a custom post type aka: CPT.

CPT’s allow us to store custom fields which in turn store information. By entering the data once we can recall that data across the website in various different layout options.

The secret here is one point of truth enter/edit in one place

How to add a gallery in a blog post using the Happyfiles plugin and with a light box popup and thumbnails. I will repeat myself here make sure your images are sized / named / compressed before uploading to the media library.

Size would be ideally a max width of 1280 x 640 remember most people will be viewing your gallery on a mobile device so you could use 800px width

Help the search robot & people who are visually impaired understand what the image is about in the context of the page/post content.

Name your images “subject name size” eg: (two cats looking down from a tree Foxton Locks Lodges 600.jpg)

Plus you will make your own image management easier by naming your files for the internal image search function

Resources for free images, file compression & cropping, we suggest using the webp format for the best compression or avif, although these tools sometimes make the file size bigger so please check. The idea media kb size is anything below 120kb but the smaller the better.

Image libraries always check any image copyright, when you download the file change the name but add a ref eg: ‘nice picture of boat company name pix-4569876234.jpg‘ so here I’ve added pix-4569876234 for pixabay and the image file ref. Should someone come along and say you are using a copyright image you know where it came from.

Yes this happens with spammers trying to earn a quick buck claiming the image belongs to their client, so for the small amount of time it takes be safe, because you won’t remember 6 months from now what resource an image came from.

Compression tools

• squoosh
• tinypng
• cloudconvert

Cropping & Cutting

• iloveimg.com/crop-image
• imageresize/crop-image

Free images

• pixabay
• unsplash
• pexels
• freepik
• isorepublic
• free nature stock
• barn images
• little visuals
• gratiso graphy
• foodies feed
• picography
• stockup

Copyright Scam

Yes this happens with spammers trying to earn a quick buck, we maybe see this once every 18>24 months.

• Worth a read

• squoosh
• tinypng
• cloudconvert

Squoosh

Let’s take a look @ Squoosh a free service provided by Google, you drag drop an image onto the tool

• bottom left > the current file size
• bottom right > file size with compression
• and the download button.

This app also offers a resizing option, I would suggest that if you have done a file compression you download that, if you now need to resize the image re upload the compressed file

You have the perfect image well almost, it just has things in the picture that ruin the actually purpose that you need it for. Welcome to the world of image cropping (link) to get the perfect result, please bear in mind that your cropped image may still need to be compressed.

Make sure your new image is the same dimensions as the one you intend to replace.

Don’t forget to compress your new image before uploading it

Tip: name your images “subject name size” eg: (two cats looking down from a tree Foxton Locks Lodges 600.jpg) / this helps you find images in the media library and helps tell search robots about your image and page

Using menu order to sort posts or custom post type items menu order works based on numbers 0 (zero) being first, I suggest using number blocks in units of 10’s or 100’s so you can insert any future items without having to re number all the current items if you used 1 > 10

You have heard the terminologies about SEO – title – meta – sitemap – structured data.

Last minute deals or special offers explained

A little code will add some spice to your lists

sms-alpha – sms-alpha-low – sms-arrow – sms-camera – sms-circle – sms-cross – sms-flame – sms-none – sms-note – sms-number – sms-point – sms-point-yellow – sms-q – sms-smile – sms-thumb – sms-tick – sms-tick-solid

So using the video custom post type all we need is the share link from you tube our system works with just using the video id from YT so they provide https://youtu.be/rk7mDWQ5yWE?si=ejbkjm1Qcwl3s9ZP we don’t need anything from the ? mark onwards, nor do we need the first part https://youtu.be/ we only want rk7mDWQ5yWE.

The reason we do it this way is because using the full provided link means it has tracking data, so when your web page loads it pops off to YT to check the video is available, so if you have 8 videos it does 8 checks before it loads the page. Ok it’s only milliseconds on the page load but if a video has been deleted or YT are having server issues your site will subsequently hang while it keeps check for the file that YT can’t find.

Our system only checks for the video when the user interacts with the play button.