\nThis month, we will surround our starter site with processes and checklists to significantly improve the way we implement it for future projects.\n\n\n\nDay One Agenda: Starter Site Spin-up Process, Speed Optimizations (Dealing with Web Core Vitals)Day Two Agenda: Preparing a Site for the Client, Website Launch Process\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"All right course handbook is there in the chat if you're just joining us in zoom, open that up say howdy.\r\n\r\nElsewhere you're logging in from today.\r\n\r\ncaptions should be up and going for everybody now\r\n\r\nmany things in the course handbook\r\n\r\nYeah, Christine, make sure you you have disconnected that old things calendar it's not going to help you anymore\r\n\r\nAll right. It's optimizing your starter site.\r\n\r\nI have lost\r\n\r\nmy camera.\r\n\r\nHere it is.\r\n\r\nSo, good news, at least for me is I have now figured out how to turn off the gesture control on my camera so no cheap humor now for anybody.\r\n\r\nIt's sue me.\r\n\r\nAm I too loud for you sue. Sorry about that. Or too low\r\n\r\nAll right. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. I'm going to drop in the link bundle for today. I'm louder than most other webinars while they need to speak up. Good grief.\r\n\r\nOh, did I not do the right.\r\n\r\nOh, you're right. Look at that. Okay, I'm going to fix that really quick. I wonder why it says that.\r\n\r\nLet's fix that. It sure does. Interesting.\r\n\r\nWell, clearly, I made a typo. I know that's hard for any of you to believe.\r\n\r\nAlright, I've now updated.\r\n\r\nYeah, the title of the name there. Hopefully it'll get updated reasonably quickly.\r\n\r\nOh, that's weird.\r\n\r\nOkay, not updated. Okay. It's fixed.\r\n\r\nYeah, the link is correct. I think the file name on Google Drive was not correct. But I did just update that. I don't know how it could have gotten 2022 When I had 2023 in the PDF title. That's weird.\r\n\r\nvalid under 18 Weird things that have happened today. Hope you're all doing well. We're about a minute to go before we get started. You're just joining us in zoom links are in the chat.\r\n\r\nGood links are in the chat ready to go handbook and course replay. We got a long way to go over the next couple of days. It's gonna be a fun course. Yeah, can it's the internet ghosts. Yeah.\r\n\r\nThat's it. We're gonna go with that.\r\n\r\nMaybe it's time for me to wash my microphone windscreen here again.\r\n\r\nIt's the it's Mercury in Retrograde. I don't know what to think about all that.\r\n\r\nAh, yes. So yeah, I wish that Zoom had a way for me to pin like the links but alas.\r\n\r\nIt does not. So if you come on after I post things in the chat. It's not there. So I'll just keep posting things in the chat.\r\n\r\nOh, Stacy, that's nice of you.\r\n\r\nHopefully it'll be a good decision and worth your while. I think there's some good stuff here. Hey, Phoebe.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to go. Okay, I got three after so let us officially start this thing.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon, everybody. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to optimizing your starter site for 2023. This is our December premium event here on the solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host at solid Academy and also your instructor for this little course where we are taking the starter site that we built last month in the November 2023 premium course. And we're going to optimize it and surround it with some systems and processes and how do we use this and become efficient. So there we go. Let me take a quick poll unscientific, though it may be in the chat. How many of you have built your starter site after last month, or you tweaked your existing site?\r\n\r\nAnybody done that already?\r\n\r\nIt's a good time every year to rebuild a Starter Site.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right.\r\n\r\nA lot of folks have done that. 75% says Liz. Yeah, good. Okay. So this can still be helpful to you even if you did not see last month course, they are best taken together. But there's still a lot in here that could benefit you if you're using Kadence. First of all, and if you have a Starter Site, so let's talk about where we're headed over the next couple of days. Now again, if you're just joining us, the links are in the chat for this 29 Page course handbook as well as the replay, which will be up about an hour after we finished today. Maybe a bit longer today because it's things going on but it will be up soon before this evening for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we have a lot to talk about over the next couple of days. Our goals in this course, are to create consistent processes for preparing and launching websites. So last month, we talked about building the starter site that will be the base for all of our future development and we did things like getting all of our plugins install our plugin stack is there we've licensed as much as we can we've maybe created a basic contact forms, we never have to do that. Again. We have you know, set all the settings like we like them for the goal is to remove as much repetitive work as possible because it doesn't really help do that repetitive work. It just takes time. So the more that we can save and do it once and then replicate that for the future, the better. So we're going to take that base site that we found and we're going to surround it with consistent processes and process checklists that make it easier to deploy. So once you've got the thing, building the thing was last month, now we're going to work out ways to become even more efficient using the thing that we've built. We're also going to spend a little bit of time on speed optimization, as we usually do in this course because it's just helpful and it's an ongoing battle for speed and WordPress. So why is this course important? Our same three big ideas from last month efficiency, proficiency and confidence, efficiency by removing as many of these repetitive tasks as we possibly can, that should reduce the overall time that it takes us to deploy client projects. Also proficiency when we're using the same tool set and the same checklists and processes. Every time we build a client site. We get better at it. And so again, our time goes down and as we tweak our checklist we get better and better. And then that results in this soft result called Confidence. It's like it's not something you might expect. By building up these processes you might expect become more efficient. You could certainly expect to become more proficient. but confidence is one of these things that happens by the way, as long as you're doing these things. So as you systematize your systems and processes and you start getting better at the things that you do. It has this effect mentally of changing how you view yourself. This can actually be a great solution to impostor syndrome are one of the solutions because when you realize hey, I've got this thing and it works and I can build things and you know, I'm really good at this and I've got great processes and systems to build and deploy. It changes the way you think about yourself. It can change the way you think about your pricing. It has an overall great impact that you might not expect. So here's where we're headed over the next two days. Today, we're going to look at the spin up process for deploying this Starter Site for every client project that'll take up most of the first hour. Then we'll be looking at speed optimizations and Webcore vitals in the second hour today. Now tomorrow, we'll be preparing the site for the client and the things that go involved in that. And then we'll walk through a website launch process. So it'll take about four hours one hour for each of these topics. And of course we'll have time for questions along the way. You can use use the chat for that or actually, let me yeah, you can use the chat for that. I don't think we're going to be rushed for time. So you can use q&a If you want, but just drop it in the chat. I'll try to get those questions in context as we're going. I think we can make that work.\r\n\r\nAll right. So everybody excited everybody ready to go.\r\n\r\nWe've got our Starter Site, and now we're going to deploy it for each client project. Okay, so there's a series of steps that I've given you below in a logical order and by logical i mean it makes sense to me so it might not make sense to you. But you know, follow my thought process and make this your own. This is the way I do it. And, you know, I think it's a good start at least for making it the way you want to do it. It assumes that you have a basic design in mind with colors and logo and other assets. It assumes you have a basic content structure in mind. So just just way the actual spin up of the development site in our world, in my agency world usually doesn't happen until the development stage, depending if we're doing our design mock up actually in browser, it might occur prior to right as we're starting design phase. It depends on how we're getting design approval from the client. But the very first step in our process in my agency is content content first. So we're thinking about content architecture, and content definition, what needs to be on the site, what needs to be created, what's already there, what the media looks like, and getting all of that in place. So we're assuming as we move into this checklist that that stuff is already done.\r\n\r\nAnd again, these are suggestions based on my workflow, you'll want to modify it to you know, to match your process and your needs. And of course, I'm not saying by any stretch that this process is perfect. It works pretty well for me, but I still we still in the agency, we are iterating on processes. We're tweaking and changing checklist moving things around. Every now and then because we find a better way to do things. So processes and checklists are living documents that grow and expand with you as your knowledge expands. So you'll want to modify this as you find more efficient ways of deploying your starter site. Also, just be aware in these processes. Still, we're still finding things that we're adding to our base site. So if through the process of deploying a Starter Site, you realize I'm doing this every time. Well, why not just put that in your starter site to begin with? So for example, one of the things that we often do in the mobile menu of virtually every single site that we build, there's two things in the mobile menu that are not well three things that are always there, obviously, the menu items that's kind of a given, but we like to put the client logo above the menu and whatever the primary call to action button for the site is below the menu. So it's logo site, you know, menu items, and then the call to action button. So for whatever reason, I had never put those in the Starter Site, but I've changed that now. So in the Starter Site, there's going to be the we're actually going to rebuild our Starter Site. Next few weeks probably, there'll be the logo at the top, the menu and the call to action because I'm adding that to every site now on the current Starter Site. So as you discover these things that you're doing every time just take an extra minute and stick that in your starter site. You don't have to worry about it again. Right.\r\n\r\nOkay, does that make sense? Everybody with me so far? None of this is perfect. It's a jumping off place, make it your own and then continually improve it.\r\n\r\nBetter. Ben is asking is it a good idea to place the Starter Site on a domain classed as Dev? As some plugins do not require a you certainly could. It depends on where you like to develop. We do have a dot dev domain that we use for Yes, site development, and we spin things off in subdomains as we're building. Yeah.\r\n\r\nSo some plugins are aware of a dot dev domain and don't worry about the licensing. We just don't usually worry about that. We'll build with whatever current version we're on and good to go.\r\n\r\nMatt, actually, I can't think of any plugins we use in the base stack that are that are dot dev domain aware, but surely you could not dev domains are fairly cheap.\r\n\r\nAll right. So let's get into this process.\r\n\r\nWe're going to start off by duplicating our Starter Site. Now, wherever that lives for you, is how you're going to duplicate it right. So a great way to do this is with solid backups. You can simply backup and migrate from your starter site to a new in our world Billy's asking is it a subdomain or a new domain? So we have a, a, our base site lives in a subdomain and we replicate it to a new subdomain.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, and there's a bunch of other tools, right, but we like solid backups. It's great. We use it for everything. So set up your build environment, subdomain localhost, whatever, and then create a database and user restore your backup over there relicense themes and plugins as needed that require it for that new domain. If you are in a cpanel environment, the WordPress toolkit if you've not seen that before, WordPress toolkit is super cool. And you can actually just with a click clone the site there at the cPanel level, it creates a database that does all those things automatically, and it's done in like a minute or two. So it saves a lot of process, a lot of steps. And we're using that for a lot of sites now. Pretty cool.\r\n\r\nOkay, so once we get started I'm gonna we're gonna dive back into our actual Starter Site that we started last month here. Once you get the new site up and going, everything's working, we're gonna move into our Kadence options. This is where I start. Now again, this is my workflow that I've sort of figured out is the best way for me if you want to move things around great, but there's usually a reason that everything I have here is in the order that it is. So we're going to first start with our Kadence options. And if you're using a different theme, substitute your theme options here. So we're gonna go to appearance and Kadence and there's all these things we can toggle on. So I usually toggle on header add ons, Header, Footer Scripts, and hooked elements. And again, these are things it's here because it's in the Starter Site, right.\r\n\r\nAnd if that's what you usually toggle on, put that in your starter site so you don't have to worry about this. Are there any other elements here? Like do I is this site going to have an ultimate menu, maybe toggle it on right? So anyway, do all your settings in your theme right here at this point?\r\n\r\nThen we're going to move forward and start to create our page structure and menus. So what I use for this and I gave you this plugin in the stack, it's not well let me let me activate it and I'll show you it's this WP create multiple posts and pages. There's a bunch of plugins that do this. I kind of liked this one the best. It works, and it lets you just make a list and it creates all those pages at once. It's faster than page add new page publish page, add new page publish speakers in that. However, this is not a plugin that I would leave active on the site, even after this point because it does some weird things like it goofs up the Media Library in ListView. Like I don't know why it does this, that this plugin that's doing this, it's just ridiculous. But anyway, at this point, you know, let's say this is an attorney's website. We're gonna want like practice areas and then bankruptcy law\r\n\r\ndivorce\r\n\r\nI can spell Business Law cetera we're gonna want a the primary call to action page will be schedule a consultation.\r\n\r\nAnyway, just list out all the pages that you're going to want to create on the site one after the other, change our post type to page, we want it to be status published with post author Nathan. So this doesn't create child relationships.\r\n\r\nSo you'll do that in just a minute. So we're going to just add these posts for example. Now we go over here to pages, and we can say that\r\n\r\nthat's here. Get rid of that. So bankruptcy law, business law, divorce are both your bulk edit and make those under practice areas. So that's how I do this is create all the pages at once real quick and then go establishing the parent child relationships here with a quick edit, and that'll get all those setup.\r\n\r\nSo once we get our page structure set up, let's see we're not going to have services in this site. Do we have a contact page? Yes. About contacts, the practice areas news. Okay, that's pretty good schedule consultation. So now we're going to build out our menus. Now, I usually have\r\n\r\nas this I wish there was a way to like bulk remove pages that don't exist.\r\n\r\nAll right, so we've got our main menu here. So we'll want to drag these new things that we created over there. Let's see about it's really just going to be that the practice areas. We'll pull this over. Because this menu we set up as part of our base site. So create the menu based on what the typical pages are on your site, so that there's as few things to remove and add later.\r\n\r\nSo now we've got this set up, we have our basic menu. I also in my base site, there's a mobile menu that I create\r\n\r\nthat is going to be\r\n\r\nwell, I'll I'll use a mobile menu if in a lot of cases, this depends on the site, a separate mobile menu, we're gonna go ahead and set it up here. I do like to put the home link on the mobile menu. Whereas on the main primary menu of the website, I don't put a home link.\r\n\r\nI think it just takes up space and people know to click the logo these days. It's up to you. I usually do not put a home menu but I'm also going in I would I have this in my base site. I'm also going to set up a like some footer menus as well.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Create new menu we'll call this footer menu.\r\n\r\nfooter menu one and that's going to be home. You all home news about contact.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAnd then determine you to I'll show you why in just a minute.\r\n\r\nThat that's going to be our schedule area our practice areas\r\n\r\nAlright, so now we have all our menu setup.\r\n\r\nYeah, see the chatter in the chat about moving home menu. I mean, you know, look at most websites that have been designed in the last five years and they do not have a home menu.\r\n\r\nIt's just it takes up space doesn't hurt anything but it just takes up space and it kind of makes it look old school.\r\n\r\nSo if the client insists on it, add it anyway. Okay, now we're gonna move into the customizer and go colors, buttons and typography. So let's see, customize.\r\n\r\nRemoving the home menu is especially important if you have a really long menu and it starts you know, at some point you start to run out of real estate for the length of that menu. And so home is absolutely the first thing to drop.\r\n\r\nOkay, so at this point we go in and we're going to customize our, our color palette. So going in here to colors and then you know dealing with button colors, fonts and typography and anything that you're going to do we assume at this point, again, the design has already worked out. So we've got font choices, we're gonna go drop all that stuff into the Kadence customizer. Now, I've also have included here just for your reference, this was also in last month's course, this cheat sheet to the Kadence color palette in the article about that so if you want that it's there. If you're using Beaver Builder, you may want to consider the central color palette plugin because you can actually set your palette there in in the central color palette, and you'll still have to set it in the Kadence customizing Customizer Settings but central color palette you can have it push that palette into Beaver Builder that's really helpful you can also by the way force a particular color palette into beaver into beaver builder with this code I just gave you the link to the Beaver Builder doc so if you're a beaver builder person take a look at that. It's kind of cool.\r\n\r\nAll right. I've also re added to this guy this was also in last month's guide, the bit my basic Kadence typography settings and it's just here so starting out with 18 pixel base font weight at 1.75 line height. That's that's the first step and whatever font you've chosen, take a look at it for body text and make sure that it's not too big or too small. The The X Factor in font sizing is the x height. So if you look at some different fonts, like Montserrat versus EB Garamond, you'll notice that the related like in Eb Garamond for example, the capital letters are this tall and the lower letters are this tall. In Montserrat the capitals are this tall and the lower lowercase letters are just a little bit smaller. That has the effect of making the font look bigger on the screen. So you'll just want to you may have to tweak this 18 pixel setting up or down depending on the font that you've chosen for the website. So just visually verify it looks good. Here's that chart I gave you last month of heading sizes at different settings. And again tweak this make it your own. I find the settings work pretty well. And always 1.25 for the line height headings and line height settings in headings. Don't you hate it when you go to a site and like the headings are spaced really far apart? It just makes things hard to read. Those ought to be tightened up a little bit.\r\n\r\nAll right. So once you have all the typography settings in we're going to jump in and customize our header and footer. I'm going to go ahead and deactivate this multiple page plug in, because I hate what it does to the Media Library.\r\n\r\nLet's see Christine can line height be determined in the chart too. It's there. Yeah. So it's right here I set the line height at 1.25 for all headings 1.75 for body text that keeps the body text separated and readable. And again, it all depends on the font but that's a good place to start.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we're gonna jump into the customizer and get into the Kadence Header Footer builder which I really really like new\r\n\r\ncustomize Okay, so at this point we are going to go into our header settings. And the easiest way to do that is just a click up here. And that opens up our Header Footer builder, which is super easy to use.\r\n\r\nJump in and get into the logo settings and get your logo set set your site icon the fav icon here as well. Just get all those things set up. And go ahead and make sure your menu looks good. It is your search looks good it is and then your call to action button is set up for shedule\r\n\r\nscheduled consultation. Okay, that's massive. So at this point, we would go in and probably tweak the button size a little bit. That looks pretty good. Go ahead and set our whatever the URL is going to be and so forth. That's looking pretty decent right there.\r\n\r\nNow at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and look at the tablet view as well. Look at that the logo for whatever reason isn't showing up.\r\n\r\nWe didn't we have a logo did I have a logo? The other side? No, I did not. Okay. So we need to let me just set a logo. I'll just use my agency logo.\r\n\r\nThat's pretty good. I find that 200 pixels is decent. I'm gonna go loops a little bit smaller here. And let's check this and see how it looks at different breakpoints. Yeah, I like that.\r\n\r\nAnd I like oops, it's a little bit too big here on mobile. So I'm gonna fix all of that right here, right now at this point. So I'm not going back into the header builder later. It's probably a little too much padding around this which we can adjust here. Just make sure that make sure that the phone item is selected\r\n\r\nand I've also noticed that doesn't update very well here.\r\n\r\nLive or whatever reason, but that should get us about where we want, which still too much space. Anyway, I'm not gonna spend time on that. Just get that this is something you'd likely do in your base site to get the spacing correct. In the mobile menu, you get the idea go and get it set up. At this point, we drop in a site icon now as well.\r\n\r\nYep. Okay.\r\n\r\nAnd again, be aware of changes you make. Add them to your base site if you find that you're doing the same thing over and over again. Now from here, we're going to go down to the footer of the site. Same difference, click on the Edit Edit button down here we have our copyright as the standard featuring Kadence footer. Over here I would set up you know you can set up like a multi column layout if you want and how many columns you want that to be you can drop things in here, I actually find it more useful to have a Kadence element as the footer of the site. And so you can do that in Kadence elements really easily by and I have this as part of our Starter Site. It's a Content section. Global flutter and just make loops\r\n\r\nmake a row of like three columns and set up your things there. When you go and set this up. You can say this is going to\r\n\r\nreplace the footer display on the entire site.\r\n\r\nYou can do any other settings you want but at this point, we are set\r\n\r\non there\r\n\r\nand so we wouldn't be at that point using the Kadence Header Footer builder anymore.\r\n\r\nOr the Kadence footer builder. I really do like using an element as the footer is I like a nicely designed footer with columns and things like that with our menus there. And it really works out nicely. So\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nAt this point also go in look at all your your mobile views for tablet and phone at this point. Make sure your footer is all set up correctly and how you want it.\r\n\r\nI've got a couple of different footer layouts in my starter site. One is a single has a single horizontal menu across the top with all the information and also there's a second footer there that has like multiple columns if you have silo menus in the footer, and so that's just present and already set up for both of those options in the Starter Site. And I'll delete the one that I'm not using at that point. I also have I've given you the CSS snippet, and I think this is really cool. I figured out the way that shouldn't happen.\r\n\r\nCan you help somebody click on that snippet. And make sure it's public.\r\n\r\nIt should be public.\r\n\r\nIt's public. Okay, well anyway, so I have\r\n\r\nthere's a way I discovered to link to the exact line in the gist. So that's kind of cool.\r\n\r\nAnyway, I thought that was nice. But I've given you this, this little bit of CSS here. And what this does, let me just show you a site we have in development right now.\r\n\r\nSo here is a site we're developing right now for an attorney. And what it does notice here how we have some silo menus. This is actually just the way we created this menu over here.\r\n\r\nMenus.\r\n\r\nOkay, where it's like the practice area at the top and in the sub items. That's how this is set up. And what that CSS does is keep them it doesn't indent the sub menus.\r\n\r\nBut it makes the the top one bold, and then it makes the other ones right below it. So it's it's just dropped that CSS in your wherever you're loading your your styles, that CSS or your global CSS, and it will sort everything correctly.\r\n\r\nAnd make it nice. So for these nice silo menus, like down here at the bottom here, that's pretty cool.\r\n\r\nThat makes sense everybody so we got our header set up we got our footer set up. We're going to view them and all breakpoints and we're done with that piece. We don't have to touch our headers and footers again. That make good everybody. Good. Where do we have a question?\r\n\r\nAll right, the next bit I'm gonna blaze through because it's pretty straightforward at this point in Kadence, or whatever theme that you're using, Go on in and start to customize your standard page layouts.\r\n\r\nSo in Kadence, that's page and post layout. We're going to go into page and just you know how are we going to do titles? Are they inside the content? Are they above the content? You know, how does that all look set up any backgrounds or whatever? You know, is our pages. Are they going to be naturally just normal? With margins? Are they going to be full width or you know, have her get all the standard page settings the default setting set now at this point.\r\n\r\nAnd you're good to go on pages from there. Also, we're going to do the same thing for the blog. So we want to first do our single post layout and we're going to do basically the exact same thing. That we kind of sample post. Yes.\r\n\r\nAlright, so here's our you know, just go through and set. How do you want your blog to look and again, in your starter site, we talked about this last month, but in your starter site, however you most like to make blogs, look, the majority of the time have those settings in your base site, so you don't have to go change this very much. Every time. But so we set up our pages now we're going to set up our single posts how they're going to look. Just do all our settings here for that. Now we're going to go to the blog archive page, and make sure that the basic blog archive page looks how we want it to look.\r\n\r\nSo basically, it's, you know, three posts across. I'm going to actually turn off the excerpt.\r\n\r\nThere's that you can maybe put a date on there if you want to do that.\r\n\r\nYou know, I get this set up. The way you like it. Maybe it's only two across, you can figure all that out. And on all of these, make sure that you view it on all breakpoints, just to make sure all the settings are correct.\r\n\r\nAgain, hopefully your typical settings and your base site are at 90% there and you just have to tweak small things at this point.\r\n\r\nAll right. Something else to look at is search results.\r\n\r\nSo let's search for something\r\n\r\nalright, so there's our search results page. How do we want this to look? So I'm gonna I'm gonna suggest that we do this with a Kadence element. And again, this is you'll want to have the element set up as part of your base site. We didn't have time to do that last month but we're going to call this element search results\r\n\r\nand you can choose how that's going to look we'll just gonna do a simple host list. Oh my, okay. I don't want to get into that.\r\n\r\nI don't want to\r\n\r\nposts that's what I wanted. Okay, and just make sure that we're using the\r\n\r\nthere is the default wearing\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nAlright, I've forgotten how we do this just a minute. Let me review that in myself. So\r\n\r\nyou can take a look at my base site.\r\n\r\nIt has been a little while.\r\n\r\nNot seen it. Okay. Well, all right. Can anybody remind me where we go to set this post loop as the default\r\n\r\nedit for the default query on the page\r\n\r\nthis one\r\n\r\nto left this one.\r\n\r\nIs it the K icon?\r\n\r\nI don't think so.\r\n\r\nNo, shoot. If I don't find it, right away and we got to move on. It's going to go on search results.\r\n\r\nHere we go.\r\n\r\nMaybe it'll just work.\r\n\r\nMaybe it will grab the the default query\r\n\r\nOh my okay.\r\n\r\nThis doesn't work quickly that I'm going to move on.\r\n\r\nWe're just kind of want one column so our search results look like this. We'll leave that make that however you want it to look. Let's just see if this works. I don't think it's going to work. But we'll try it.\r\n\r\nOh, you know what? You may be right.\r\n\r\nYou may be right. Maybe this is not a content element, Billy. Well, let's just see if it works. But I think you may be right Billy.\r\n\r\nNope, that didn't work. It's showing posts.\r\n\r\nBut oddly, it's showing three columns.\r\n\r\nLet's try this one more time. Yeah, I think you're right. It should be a template.\r\n\r\nWe'll start that over again.\r\n\r\nThat's why we didn't get the settings on that.\r\n\r\nHill stone for the win. Thank you.\r\n\r\nRight.\r\n\r\nTemplate placement\r\n\r\nthank you that's\r\n\r\nno\r\n\r\nokay, well, we made a mess. We'll have to look that up. So that's basically what you do.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nI think you're right, it should be a template that's going to drive me crazy.\r\n\r\nThat's still has to be set. I don't want to get bogged down here.\r\n\r\nHuh. Replace the content\r\n\r\nshould be loop item content that pulls the current loop into this on the search results. user shouldn't matter expires shouldn't matter. Explanation matter.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nI don't know why it's not working. So just do that. You'll be fine.\r\n\r\nWell, we'll solve this at a later date. Check back in office hours. Okay. So customize your search results page. Wasn't that easy?\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. Next is our custom 404 page. This is actually not a problem at all in Kadence. And so again, in your base site, go ahead and create have an element setup for your 404 page template or a four page right here it is placement on referral for content display on our not found page. And that's all we need there.\r\n\r\nAnd we can have a row and we can have put a search box in here and we can say blah blah blah over here\r\n\r\nupdate, okay.\r\n\r\nAnd so\r\n\r\nwhen we do a bla bla bla and get a four, four, we'll get our nice 404 page here. That's kind of cool to kind of have a template set up in your base site. And you can go in and tweak it for the client. Now this is this is a really neat thing to do. It's just an extra little step that you can give to your client because you know, make fluorophores keep them on brand. Let the 404 page speak with the brand's voice typography colors all that instead of just the basic not found that WordPress and WordPress gives you make them funny people get frustrated if they get a page not found so you know have something funny or engaging or interesting when it shows up. One neat thing you can do is go grab a lot of animation and use the Kadence Lotty block and drop in a lot of animation. So there's something moving around and looking neat when they hit a 404 page. You can even if you wanted to embed a game that and one of these embeddable WordPress games like the dinosaur game that Google used to embed in Chrome, make sure that you have helpful messages there links to popular site areas. Soft call to action, perhaps search box. Anyway, set up a basic 404 layout and then tweak it for every client as you're moving this forward. I've given you some really cool 404 Page examples.\r\n\r\nOh good.\r\n\r\nOkay, well look at our taco bell is Taco Bell down surely.\r\n\r\nTherefore, a four page which\r\n\r\nOh, interesting. I don't know what's going on there. Well, maybe all these are?\r\n\r\nSurely not.\r\n\r\nOkay, so like here's a Lego this isn't a perfect example of an on brand 404 page. Really cool.\r\n\r\nThis one's really neat. This is a developer's website.\r\n\r\nAnd this is how many of you remember the old lemmings game? I used to play this on that PC years ago. And it's actually you're trying to save the lemmings before they hit the crown. And get squashed.\r\n\r\nOh, and you can't hear this, but there's a really obnoxious squishing sound that's happening. Anyway.\r\n\r\nThis one's kind of neat. Anyway, you can take time and look at some of these examples just for some inspiration of 404 pages. But there's some pretty neat stuff here. Like here's a Space Invaders game play this actually works.\r\n\r\nCool.\r\n\r\nUm, let me that's pretty poor.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAnyway, you get the idea.\r\n\r\nThis is kind of neat.\r\n\r\nThis is also a game.\r\n\r\nYou can play.\r\n\r\nAnyhow, you get the idea. So just build out a nice four or four page for your clients.\r\n\r\nOkay, so set up your element just like that like we just did very easily. Okay, now this is a pet peeve of mine. And that is styling the Kadence full screen search. I am not a fan of this search experience. And unfortunately there's not a way in the customizer to really deal with this. I don't like the solid black. I don't like that it's 100% opaque. I do not like the box shadow on the search anybody with me on that?\r\n\r\nDon't like it Okay, so I've given you some CSS.\r\n\r\nAnd here is well, it's just the box shadow. But I had more here for you. It's easy enough to deal with. So here is some CSS which for simplicity, I'm going to put in the customizer\r\n\r\nand that will get rid of the box shadow.\r\n\r\nThat's much nicer. And then if you want you can just inspect this and grab the see where's my overlaps the search drawer right there and doing the Edit no\r\n\r\none is doing the color here\r\n\r\nright there it is. Search drawer and drawer enter. Actually let's let's grab this\r\n\r\nand we can make that background something like point nine that'll be significantly\r\n\r\nless opaque.\r\n\r\nIt's a little less opaque or you can change it to by the way, have you guys seen how to use the CSS variables. So down here you may have noticed in the CSS Inspector there's all these variables that are set. In some of these we get down to a spot or the Kadence variables like right here. There's our global pallet position. 1234 Did you know you can copy this and use that in CSS. So here we can say our global palette one and that's going to now be our background.\r\n\r\nSo when we refresh, it should be that blue. See there so you can pull any of these global palette items.\r\n\r\nAnd if you're using if you're in a beaver builder situation and you're using central color palette, it has a way to assign global variables like that as well. And you can pull those just the same way. So it's just bar is going to make this bigger make this where you can read it better\r\n\r\nto do\r\n\r\nso if you can use this in place of any standard like if you're gonna use hash, you know hex name for the color, it's just bar open parenthesis name and the variable closed parenthesis and the neat thing is watch this when we go and change. If we go change this in our Customizer Settings come on colors. Alright, so this is global one right there. If we change that to you know, pink, fuchsia.\r\n\r\nNow, it automatically updates because it's a variable.\r\n\r\nSo the background is that way. Kind of neat, right? This by the way is how when you change your palette and Kadence all the colors update because it's using CSS variables.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo that reaches the end of the first part. And I'm actually about two minutes ahead of time. So we'll pause just for a minute questions, comments, snide remarks about the spin up process. So at this point, you've got our headers built footers built, search page, search page, completely finished? Yes. 404 Page, tweaked and customize all of that set. And, yeah, we're ready to start building individual pages. Let's see.\r\n\r\nStacy, what was the code? So it's just it's right here.\r\n\r\nInstead of doing you know background\r\n\r\ninstead of doing it like this with a hex code or an RGB or whatever, just do var that means a CSS variable var, open parenthesis the name and you get that again from just going into the inspector, scrolling all the way down. And you'll see these global variables here and just copy this bit here and use it and you'll find that that makes life so very much easier.\r\n\r\nAh, Stephanie does the additional CSS go in the child theme it totally so it's gonna go wherever you are going to put your CSS. So yeah, it's whatever. Yeah. So if you're putting if you have a styles dot css, where you're putting Child Theme CSS put it there. I put it in the customizer for convenience. I hate the customizer CSS.\r\n\r\nSomething we started doing actually is using a Kadence element where our global CSS that way it doesn't have to go load the styles that CSS from the child theme. You can do it a lot of different ways.\r\n\r\nBut just the I guess, let me add this. Whatever you do, be consistent in your development processes.\r\n\r\nSo it goes so that you know where you're going to put it right so don't put sometimes in the child theme and sometimes somewhere else.\r\n\r\nSue is asking about that element. So the way we do this in there's a drawback to this, but I'll show you how it works. We're going to create a CSS we're going to call it global. It's going to be an HTML editor, global CSS. We're going to put that placement inside the head tag, and then it's just going to be a script tag with our CSS listed in here, so it's dropping in the header of the site. So it's all inline in the header\r\n\r\nso in that case, it would look something like this.\r\n\r\nRight\r\n\r\nso the downside with this as you lose autofill.\r\n\r\nSo the Kadence element code editor doesn't autofill CSS markup for you. So that's the downside.\r\n\r\nSo where you would add the site's CSS right here?\r\n\r\nJust as it was a script tag in the header of the site.\r\n\r\nYou're loading it as a tag just like you would anything else.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Can you change the inside of the search box asks VB well let's take a look.\r\n\r\nI see b Do you mean like make the the text box you typed in a different color?\r\n\r\nYeah, so like mate, let's make this a different. Okay, so what does that let's see what we've got here label input type equals, so this would be our our good option here. So we'll do search field. I'm just going to go back over here to CSS.\r\n\r\nAlright, so I'm going to further make I'm going to restrict this to search drawer search fields that's just going to be on this overlay page. Search field.\r\n\r\nBackground here actually, we see the background is set to transparent. Let's actually grab the whole CSS markup here.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll say let's make this RGB a\r\n\r\nso 90% white\r\n\r\nbut and we're also going to let hang on background\r\n\r\nand we'll want to make the text\r\n\r\ndark gray.\r\n\r\nSee if that works. I think it will\r\n\r\nknow Awesome.\r\n\r\nWell\r\n\r\nsee if that works\r\n\r\nyes so now we need to make it's gonna require an important which not sure why you may be able to research that and find something else that will make it not have to be important.\r\n\r\nTry not to do that. Yeah, there we go. That's not bad. I\r\n\r\nneed to change that color too.\r\n\r\nAll CSS All right, anybody else before we quit? We're right at time for break.\r\n\r\nWhy do we just stay in important Okay, so, it Sue it is best practice to use as few importance as possible. It's always better to restrict or to get specific on CSS by adding additional selectors to make it more and more specific until you target the right thing. Important is kind of case it's the use, use it as a last resort because it can often affect other things. Just best practice not to use important if you can avoid it.\r\n\r\nAnd there are many developer reasons for that, which honestly, I can't remember at this moment, that's there you go.\r\n\r\nOkay, all right. Let's take a 10 minute break. We're back at five minutes after so 10 minutes from now we're back. That'll be five minutes. After 2pm Central. We'll see you back then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute. From now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we're back for the final hour of day one talking about speed optimizations and web core vitals. So if you have listened to anything that I have been talking about over the last couple of years, you know that I have a love hate relationship with web core vitals and site speed. And now we're just gonna get right in the middle of all that now. All right, so let's talk about what are Webcore vitals and why do we need to care about them?\r\n\r\nSo Google, several years ago, introduced this concept of Webcor vitals to give preference in search engine results to sites that offer a better user experience. And so, web core vitals are like your website's vital signs, right? So it measures your site against four different areas of performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. So if your site scores high in the web core values, this might help it rise in the search results. Now, here's what I'm going to tell you. Speeding up WordPress is incredibly frustrating. Can anybody else relate to me with that? Do you not find speeding up WordPress is just about one of the most frustrating things that we do. It's just frustrating, right? So if you try to get serious about it, you're going to be frustrated. And if you're not, please tell me how. So I want to learn better, but I'm telling you, it's just gonna be frustrating, and here's why.\r\n\r\nModern beautiful websites have lots of stuff on the page. stuff on the page takes longer to load.\r\n\r\nModern beautiful websites have some interactivity and movement, interactivity and movement take a while to load.\r\n\r\nSo from the get go, they're going to be slower. To load then a very basic website. And we're not building basic websites, right. We're building beautiful modern websites for our clients, but they're engaging and users you know, like to stick around. Okay. Now, the other second reason that this whole work is frustrating is that there's lots of different testing tools available that often give wildly different results when you test a page. Like one will say you're awesome. The next one says you suck. And it's just crazy how these tools give such different results. And even this is even worse. If you test the same page in the same tool back to back, you often get different results. So it's like what am I supposed to do here?\r\n\r\nLike one time I test I get like a 95. The next time I test I get a 75 How is that even possible? Right? So it's frustrating and if you get frustrated, you're in great. You're in the you're in the club, right? We're all frustrated. There is no magic wand to speed up WordPress. There is no plugin that you can install. There is no blog post that you can read. There's no course that you can go to that's going to immediately solve this issue for you. It is hard, it is frustrating. And you know, that's just the way it is. I wish there was a difference. If you read or see anything that promises you quick and easy speed improvements. They are trying to sell you something and it's probably not going to work the way they say it is. That's just life. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo now that I've depressed everybody, let's talk about why this is difficult. speed optimization is hard work. If you're serious about optimizing your websites for speed. You're going to have to invest time to perfect your process. You're probably also going to have to invest money in premium tools to deal with things like on page optimization and image optimization and those sorts of things. There is a lot of trial and error involved sometimes a lot of error is involved in this. speed optimization tools are one of the things that can most readily break your WordPress websites, the wrong setting and all of a sudden, you don't notice it right away but up your form won't submit because you've optimized the JavaScript wrong or something like that's going on, or the CSS is all wonky. How many of you have had that happen? But you've said everything, it looks great, the site's fast, and you come back the next day, and the CSS is like, oh, everything's all goofed up. Oh, it's horrible. So, look, this is a fact of life and it's almost a rite of passage. If you're gonna try to do speeding up WordPress.\r\n\r\nSo while 80% of your settings might work from site to site, there's still likely you're going to need to dial in some settings on every site. It is.\r\n\r\nIt is frustrating.\r\n\r\nBut here's the thing. I want to tell you. speed optimization is not all there is now there are people and I know him I know they're out there. They're all over Facebook groups are talking about all we can make. Everything should be fast. If you're not getting the 99 on every 100 100 On every website on Webcor vitals you're doing it wrong. Bla bla bla, y'all. That is garbage. Hear me say it it is garbage. You're free to tweet you know Phil, feel free to quote tweet me on that. Speed. Listen, speed is one factor in Webcor vitals one of the four factors and Webcor vitals and Webcor vitals are only one signal in Google's overall algorithm. So they're one part of one part of the thing. All right, speed is not all there is. Believe me. Content is king. It's always been about content, it will always be about content. Articles on search engine. Blogs, like Search Engine Journal, have noted that Google has been emphasizing other ranking signals above web core vital So listen, is it worth spending hours of your time to notch up a site speed from a 92 to a 99? Please don't do that. Your time is better spent elsewhere. Write better content and your site will get ranked better. You know now, where speed comes into account is if you have a domain authority. That's roughly the same size as your competitor. If you have content that's roughly the same value as your competitor, then site speed might inch you out above them, but it's not you know, if your site doesn't have great backlinks if it doesn't have good domain authority, simply making the site faster is not going to jet it to the top of the ratings. That's garbage that's sold to you by people who are trying to sell you optimization services, or sell you some magic bullet plugin that's supposed to just fix everything and those things don't exist.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna step down off the soapbox now. Are y'all with me?\r\n\r\nOkay, hopefully I haven't offended everyone.\r\n\r\nHopefully. Okay, here we go.\r\n\r\nLet's talk about how we deal with site speed. Okay, number one, the number one thing to consider if you're trying let's let's let's approach it from this perspective. Do we all want to build sites that are pretty fast? Right that don't take five seconds to load?\r\n\r\nOf course we do. Right? Of course, we want to build quick website.\r\n\r\nSo there are some things that we need to think it's like this. Do you want to build accessible websites? Like do you want to audit and just like, build websites that you're you have, you don't just want to think about accessibility? No, of course not. There's some basic things you can do to make the site more accessible. You know, in the same way, there's some basic things you can do to make the site faster out of the gate. It starts with your design. Speed starts with the stuff on the page that's going to be loaded, okay. I don't care what magic plugin you have. I don't care if you have the fastest web host in the world run through eight different, you know, layers. of caching, and Cloudflare all that stuff. I don't care if the page is really long and has giant images and video and interactive elements. It is going to be slow.\r\n\r\nI mean, it's going to be slow. You might speed it up marginally by some other tactics. But speed starts with design the stuff that's actually on the page. So consider all of the elements that are on a page, every single thing, the text, the images, the asset, all the things on a page, like weight. Every one of these things adds weight. It's like you know, there's a scale and a little bucket and you're dropping in wait for every little thing that you're adding on that page, right? Text, relatively light, images, videos and interactive elements like anything that is interactive tabs and what do you do poorly do flippy cards and all that stuff that everybody likes to use? That's the technical term. By the way. All that stuff requires JavaScript has to load ads. Wait, wait, wait, wait and I'm stacking those things up. Right clients want beautiful pages, oh, put a video in my hero area and I want you know, all these interactive flippy things all the way down that well that's great, but it's going to make the page heavy. And there's nothing that an optimization plugin can do. That's going to fix that. It might marginally improve load time, but the page just weighs a lot. Bottom line. So you say to the client, I can do that. But it's going to make the page slow, and that's going to hurt you ultimately perhaps in your rankings. So could we do the same thing or, you know, accomplish the same end result with a lighter page weight? That's how we ought to be thinking about design. So key pages as simple as possible, while making them as engaging as possible. Get the fewest number or use the fewest numbers of images, blocks and modules. However, you're building that you can to get the impact that you need. In other words, ask yourself, Does this really need to be on the page? Does this really need to be a tabbed section? Or could it just be a series of headings that are maybe staggered back and forth for some design interest, right, employee animations and interactions sparingly?\r\n\r\ninteractions of any kind, like if a mouse mouse is over something, and something happens, any kind of interaction like that requires JavaScript. And so JavaScript has to load it just in it's going to make the page take longer, or it's going to add CSS if it's lots of different animations, those sorts of things. So use static elements and basic blocks or page builder modules, wherever possible. And so ask yourself Does the page really need that scrolling logo block or what just a couple of columns of images work that are static? That's the kind of decisions to make and that making sense. It's all like you got to make design decisions that are going to end up with a fast page.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. So design first, that's your first approach. Second is hosting. All right. Even the lightest design can be slowed down. If you're on shared hosting. I don't care who shared hosting it is shared hosting is shared hosting, and it's going to have fewer resources, even if that web host has their own handy dandy optimization plugin. It's still shared hosting, and it's going to be slower than quality hosting, and either a managed WordPress platform or a VPS or dedicated environment.\r\n\r\nInexpensive shared hosting does have a place, okay. That's great for personal sites or hobby sites or whatever, sites that aren't competing in the marketplace. So any site that's in competition for others for traffic ought to be hosted on professional hosting. And I'll have that conversation with clients sometimes and I'll explain you know, like last week, last Friday, we talked about, you know, different kinds of hosting and how to position that in terms of a care plan. And look, you know, I'll tell clients, you're using amateur level hosting on a professional level site, right like this. Is this is hobbyist hosting. It's not business class hosting, you got a real business, it needs real hosting. So start with design, build light pages, second, put it in a hosting environment that's going to deliver those things fast. And only then, do we worry about asset optimization. Now let me ask you a question. When you hear all these discussions about making WordPress faster, where do they always start?\r\n\r\nThey start with asset optimization. Oh, you got to get this plugin and you got to have these settings. Listen, start with design, then hosting and been at asset optimization you can optimize your assets all day long. But if the design is too big, or if the hosting is too slow, you're spinning out like you're wasting tons of time, it's not going to help. So apply strategies for fine tuning assets used by the website and there's different layers of this. image optimization is probably the very first thing I would look at, even before you get into all these plugins that tweak your JavaScript, all that stuff. image optimization is the biggest bang for your buck. So we want to come we want to convert images to web be most likely because they load quicker. We also want to make sure we are we've got some sort of something on the server, a WordPress plugin that compresses all of your images. I'm gonna talk more about that in just a minute. We also want to make sure that we have a good page and browser caching strategy, like good hosting that has a quality object cache page cache that eliminates the back and forth of going to the database. We also want to make sure finally that we're deferring CSS and JavaScript. And this is where it gets really complicated and breakable. And is the thing that's going to have the smallest aggregate impact across all your speed optimization efforts. So look, you can spend all your time tweaking all the individual CSS and JavaScript files you want. But if your images aren't optimized, if you're not using caching, if your hosting is terrible, and if your page is gigantic, it's not gonna matter. It's not gonna matter. So start at the top work your way down. Does that Okay? Am I Am I harping on something I don't need to be harping on?\r\n\r\nMaybe so, anyway.\r\n\r\nOkay. So lots of discussion starts and ends with acid optimization. Don't look, don't that's, that's important, but it's like way down the list. Get the other stuff right first. Okay. So let's talk about how we evaluate our sites for speed. So there's first of all, there's several tools available. Pingdom is a classic one, I don't use ping them at all anymore. It's not helpful to me. I would recommend not using GT metrics is a good tool however, they've moved the mobile test out of the free version. It is helpful in I do like the GT metrics waterfall view. It's it can help you see what you know, it's an easier way to see what's maybe causing a delay, but it only gives you the desktop view and quite frankly, that's cop is not the problem. In speed optimization, it's mobile. So that brings us down here to these two, which are essentially the same tool. First of all, Google's web dot Dev, it's at web dot dev slash measure. This gives you what Google sees. And that's really what matters because it's Google's web core vitals. It's free. You can see the mobile and desktop, it gives you all four of your scores in the web, core vitals categories, and you can click View Report under your URL and get a thorough look at all these things. So this is the place to go but for quick and immediate information, use lighthouse in Chrome, and I'm gonna guess that most of you have seen this already. But if you haven't, this is the place to start in Chrome. Go to the inspector. Click the lighthouse tab. And right here, we get all the web core vitals reports. I'm going to only do performance because I'm only at this point concerned about site speed, set it for mobile, and I can just run right here in the browser, my PageSpeed audit. So as you're tweaking and making changes, this is the way to do a get a quick reading on your site speed. I generally process is pretty quick 1015 seconds and you're done.\r\n\r\nAnd you'll get the Lightspeed score.\r\n\r\nOh my goodness, it's taken longer than normal. Alright, so no optimization out of the gate. We got to 83 on mobile. And so it does give you some additional information you can drill down into if you like, but use Lighthouse it's the simplest tool that's gonna help you see what's going on. Now, this is important. Best practice is to run in a guest browser. So you're not logged in and so that there are no browser extensions running. Okay, now I know some people say do to incognito, that's fine. But in your Google Chrome, sometimes your incognito mode can have browser extensions enabled. So what I do like here, go to guest This is the best way to do it. Totally clean Chrome. And let's go to this URL, and it should be faster because in our last test, we were actually logged in. When you're logged into WordPress, it loads a bunch of extra JavaScript and stuff.\r\n\r\nOh, man, it's locked down. So let's unlock it.\r\n\r\nWe've got that site privacy set up here with my private site.\r\n\r\nOnce turn that off.\r\n\r\nNow we should be able to get to the page. Oh, come on.\r\n\r\nWhy don't we get Chrome caching going on?\r\n\r\nMake sure cloud I think I turned on Cloudflare developer mode for this but I may have got to\r\n\r\njust really quickly\r\n\r\nGood grief\r\n\r\nokay\r\n\r\nokay, development don't get turned off. Alright, so let's bypass cache. That's probably what our issue is here.\r\n\r\nAnd let's go back to Oh, my goodness, come on.\r\n\r\nWell, anyway, how did I get the but the guest button. Yeah. So under your profile here.\r\n\r\nThere's a guest.\r\n\r\nLet's try this again. And you know what, maybe it may be cached. I'm just gonna go to a different browser now.\r\n\r\nOh, but I don't have a cat it's gotta be chrome\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go. Now if we run this test again, here, these are all on by default. Global.\r\n\r\nBetcha we're going to be significantly faster than we were.\r\n\r\nOver on this other one.\r\n\r\nWas it an 82? Yeah, see, it's 10 points higher just not being logged in. With no optimization. Anyway, that's why you do your guest browser.\r\n\r\nThank me later.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo lighthouse in Chrome. You can also go to Google PageSpeed Insights, which is PageSpeed dot web dev. This is it's really helpful for sites that have some degree of traffic, because it will tell you what other users are actually experiencing with PageSpeed. So it's not like a simulation. It actually shows from Chrome browser visitor data, how fast the website actually takes to load or how long it takes load out in the field. So that's a good thing. You never played with that. A lot of good insights there.\r\n\r\nAll right. So why does my site speed vary each time if you know your site speed with two different tools, you frequently get two different test results even if B tests back to back some of the factors that could influence this are the speed of the Internet. At that particular time, or the network backbone where you live that actually can make things take longer to get back and forth, could also be the resources available on your server at that moment, like if several people are loading your page or if maybe you've got several sites on your server and at that moment, there's two backups running. Well, that could possibly impact a single site speed. It could also be that Gremlins broke into the Google data center and turned some things and you know, who knows? Nobody knows why. Ultimately, it just happens that way.\r\n\r\nBut this is the big question, which is okay. Why is my site so much slower on mobile than it is on desktop? Like if we go let me go back to our guest profile here?\r\n\r\nIf we run the speed test on desktop?\r\n\r\nIt is going to be probably half a second\r\n\r\nish\r\n\r\nYeah, so one second, right. And that's twice as fast as it was on mobile. And there's some reasons for this. First of all, it's the way Google is simulating the mobile visit. So what they do, they're actually simulating a slow connection. And so you can actually if we run this again, and we do a mobile test, it'll show you that they are in fact, throttling your bandwidth and they are throttling the processor speed. So Google lighthouse and measure are assuming a mobile connection at 1.6 megabits that is so slow.\r\n\r\nIt's the bottom 25% of 4g connections, and the top 25% of 3g connections. So they're assuming a very, very slow connection to the internet. For the for the modern day. They're also assuming a slower processor. So they simulate performance on older mobile phones, and do CPU limiting to do that, which means that pages WordPress that have deep div trees on page content that are all positioned by CSS and you have to load JavaScript, if the phones if it's an old phone, it's gonna take longer because it takes longer for the phone's processor to render all that stuff. And so if we take a look here, we'll notice that\r\n\r\nemulated by a Moto G power with Lighthouse 11.2. Now Moto G power phone want to anybody want to guess when that was\r\n\r\nwas released four years ago right so it's a four year old phones or the old slower phone with a slow 4g throttling connection. So it's just it's always going to be slow. always going to be slow because of the way Google is emulating mobile. So yeah, and just by the nature of how WordPress works, it takes JavaScript load, it takes a dip tree, it takes CSS, it just takes longer to load the pages. So what do we do about this? Now here's where we get into some of the plugins and advice. The first thing I mentioned this earlier, the first thing to really pay attention to is caching. Now some quality web hosts provide you with an object cache. Many of the Managed WordPress platforms like Nexus, offer a built in object cache. Now why is this important? An object cache takes flat pages that were fetched from the database and actually creates an object that can be loaded instead of every time the page loads, having to go out to the database, grab something, come back and then display it. So it really speeds up the loading of a site. This shows up in the initial server response time. So if you're looking and trying to diagnose where your speed is, having trouble, one of the items is initial server's response time or TTFB. time to first byte. If that's high, it's because you don't have good caching in place. Because it's taking a while to go out, grab the database, come back, load the page, send it to the browser, right. So caching will help that So there's several good WordPress caching plugins as well. There'll be Super Cache WP Total Cache. Both of those are fine. If you're in a hosting environment where caching is provided absolutely use their system. We as an agency use a lightspeed server. Lightspeed is an Apache replacement that has an object cache and a corresponding WordPress plugin that puts all the magic together.\r\n\r\nAnd it works great, right? So you've got to have a caching solution period.\r\n\r\nSecond, are these all in one optimization plugins Now, if you're serious about website optimization, you need a solid no pun intended plugin that includes a full suite of tools. That includes things like page caching, browser caching, Jesup, asset optimization, all this stuff.\r\n\r\nSo you need a plug in and this is one of those things that you're going to want to invest money in because the free versions of things are often there's a big difference between the free version and paid version on most of these plugins, with the odd exception of WP amuse hummingbird. The free version is really pretty darn good.\r\n\r\nSo if you're looking for an all in one plugin, I mean, I'm not a fan of dope PMU in general, but it's probably the best single free standalone optimization plugin out there. The Pro version gives you a few extra features and some CDN features as well. But like this is a good place to start. I actually like hummingbird quite a bit.\r\n\r\nThe dopey rocket is probably parent has asked me if I've tried perf matters. I have the it doesn't do caching. So I'm suggesting taking an all in one optimization approach. Hurst matters is great for asset optimization. It's also really easy to break your site with perf matters. You really have to know what you're doing like it's geek level eight out of 10 at least, to get that up and working. Although the developers great, very responsive, it's just you know, we've taken in my agency, we've taken a different approach.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, Perf Matters is great. So WP Rocket probably the best, all in one overall.\r\n\r\nIt is really expensive. All things considered, but it does solve the problem and for the most case, it has caching it has an asset optimization. This is the one we've chosen because it integrates with our server software Lightspeed the plug that here here don't miss this. Okay. The plugin is free in the WordPress plugin directory, but I would not use the free plugin. If you're not using Lightspeed server. Okay? You can actually do some things up pretty easily with this. But if you're using Lightspeed server, which usually costs a fair amount for the license for your server, then you definitely want to use Lightspeed cache because they're a beautiful combination. Okay, any questions about this? stuff so far? Is everybody with me?\r\n\r\nAssume from the silence that we're all good.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nScrolling on down, okay, image optimization. This is also one of those areas. That if you're going to be a professional WordPress developer, you need to invest in an image optimization solution. It is super expensive, super important to spend a little money and get a good solution for this issue because like I said, image optimization is probably the first place you want to start with PageSpeed optimization. Because clients and people who aren't really sure what they're doing upload ginormous images to WordPress, and why is my homepage taken forever? Well, you have a six megabyte image in your hero area. That's why so we need a plug in it's gonna go take care of that stuff. Now. Yes, I know, you can optimize like in Photoshop or something and then upload those images. It takes so much time to do that, like oh, just by the image optimization plugin, and don't worry about it anymore. So the result of the premium version, there's free versions of most of these out there. The results of the premium level of these image optimizers is significantly higher. They're way better than the free alternative. Like there's a whole other level of optimization these get that will often result in half the size images of the free version. It is significantly better.\r\n\r\nSo pay for this. This is something just to pay for.\r\n\r\nThe image compression results between the top WordPress image optimizers are so close that it doesn't really matter. So the point is, Okay, which one do I like the best, which has the user interface that I like, and who's got a deal that I can get? Right, those are your two decision points. One is not necessarily better. As far as the results go. The user interface can vary dramatically between these. So get one that you're comfortable with and you don't mind and so forth. Billy? Yes. Lightspeed does also include image optimization. We've not gotten into it. I know some people were pretty satisfied with it. We use a standalone image optimizer, we actually use E dub.\r\n\r\nSo we have not really gotten into it. I understand it works pretty well. But it's not something we're using Lightspeed for right now. A great article here on just looking at all the different options, but like I said, e dub is what we've chosen as an agency, but honestly, main reason is because I got a lifetime deal on AppSumo a couple years ago. The interface is really geeky. Took a little while to get used to E dub is also currently back on AppSumo. But it's not as good as it's not a unlimited sites deal like it had before. But it's there's several sites on there. It's worth looking at. Some other ones are short pixel optimal image of phi. I think Melanie just mentioned.\r\n\r\nImagery. Do you mean image of phi melody? I think this is the one from WP Rocket image of phi.io. Yep, it's really good. Works with that EP rocket. Yeah, so if you're going to do the rocket, this would be a good pair with it. And of course the old fashioned and the old standbys smash the PME plugin. We quit using it because it doesn't delete the original large size images, which is ridiculous.\r\n\r\nOkay, any other questions on image optimizers before we roll forward\r\n\r\nAll right, let's talk about something else. That is one of those silver bullet things that is proposed, oh, your site is slow. You should just have a CDN that's going to solve your problems. The answer to that is no. That is not the answer. That is not going to solve your problem. Unless you're dealing with a very high traffic website. If you're having a what I would call a typical website for us, wherever you might get some visitors but it's not like 1000s and 1000s of visitors every hour. You don't need a CDN. In that case. CD ends in my experience for the typical client that we serve are not helpful at all for speed. Actually, they can slow the site down. In some cases, it's much better to invest in faster hosting than it is to have a CDN unless your site is really high traffic. So the reason for this is CDN is used to be great because in just stepping back a minute for a CDN is a content delivery network. CDN will pull your images up into the cloud and serve the images from the cloud several at a time as the page is loading. Now that was really helpful many years ago before the advent of HTTP two because under HTTP 100 means a little journey into geek land here. But with HTTP one, the web's web server would load one thing at a time, give me the CSS, give me the HTML, one image to image three and like that. HTTP two has been around for years. And it allows multiple requests. So it's pulling in JavaScript and CSS and HTML and images and all that stuff all at once. It's making multiple requests, pulling in those things at once. And so that primary original uses for a CDN is no longer needed. If your server is running HTTP two, if your server is not running HTTP two, find a new host because it's been around forever and there's no good reason not to use it. Now, if you're on a slow hosting, you might benefit from CDN that's hosting fixes this for the most part.\r\n\r\nThere are free CD ends like Cloudflare and others. Don't use those. Please don't use the free CDN. It's not going to help. It's going to slow things down. The same in my experience. Also it like it's an asset CDN. Like for example, WPM you hummingbird gives you a free or at the pro level. They include a CDN for your assets like JavaScript and CSS. As well as for images if you're using Smosh jetpack does this also know they're just not? They're not fast. It I when I use these things, it slows down in virtually every test I've ever run. Now, there may be some people out there that have had different results but in my experience it adds a layer of complication to things in the troubleshooting like maybe something that the CDN or cider like it adds more complication, and it doesn't benefit speed. So I just, I would advise you to ignore these. Now a premium CDN like the Cloudflare premium might help you if you have a high traffic sites. So that would be my recommendation. If you got a site with super high traffic, bring in the premium clouds and that will probably help but none of these other options are very good.\r\n\r\nAlso, by the way, I Cloudflare offers a per site license called Cloudflare APO automatic platform optimization that works pretty well with WordPress and does a lot of this optimization for you in the cloud.\r\n\r\nIt costs like $5 per site per month. So it can get pricey depending on how many sites you have. But it's a good it's a good solution. We have one client that's using it and likes it.\r\n\r\nYeah. So Karen is mentioning the the lifetime deal for E dub that is on AppSumo it's $99. But the catch the catch is it is only for 10 sites and the deal is not stackable, so\r\n\r\n$10 More for unlimited, I don't think\r\n\r\nyeah, there now there's no unlimited deal anymore\r\n\r\nsites. Interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, I would totally grab this if that's true. Okay, that this is different, like within the last week, because there was there's that you can find. I just read this because in preparing and updating my guide here Yeah, wow. Okay. So I think that was added since last week. Because there was even a question about that. And they said, No, we're not offering the unlimited deal anymore. So the people that app sumo apparently prevailed upon e dub. And yeah, so if you need an image optimizer, it's a pretty good deal. Just be aware that you eat dub is not the greatest user interface. You really you need to go through and understand the settings and take some time. Once you get it. You've got it. And like we have all our base in the base site. All the settings are pre done for each job though. They don't change. But you it takes some time investment to learn how it's set up. It's not the most intuitive UI Okay, that's my caveat. That being said, I love it. I use it.\r\n\r\nA class on eat up I don't know.\r\n\r\nIf you bug me in office hours, I can I wouldn't mind walking through my settings in the base site, but that's a good Office Hours question. How's that?\r\n\r\nYeah, Liz. Right. So I'm not crazy. You look at that last week or last month during the Starter Site course. And it wasn't that way. Right? So I'm not nuts. Thank you Liz for confirming at least that part. Okay.\r\n\r\nAll right. That actually brings us to the end here of well shoot that we have time right now to look at Edom settings. Is that Is that worth time right now? Would that be helpful?\r\n\r\nOkay, that's a lot of yeses.\r\n\r\nLet me do this. Okay. Some of you I know aren't using E dub and you might not care about this and you want to drop off. So let's do this. questions right now that do not pertain to E dub. I will answer those now. Anything that I missed earlier in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe'll ask those now. And then if you're not using YNAB, and you want to drop off, you can do that and you won't miss anything. Tomorrow, we're going to pick right up here with repairing a site for the client. And I'm going to show you the plugin that I wrote that I've made available to you that will allow you to drop a Kadence element in the WordPress dashboard. Lead aren't cool. It's definitely beta. But yeah.\r\n\r\nOkay, any other questions? Not Eat up, Shannon? Oh, by the way, Shannon, you're only chatting with me if you flip the two in the chat. area to everyone and everybody can see your question. So Shannon, is asking how do you convert images to web P great question that would be handled by your image optimization plugin. And so I'm about to show in either how that I have that set up. But when we upload a JPEG for example, to a site, it automatically crunches out all the sizes for the site and makes the conversion to web P all at the same time. So you can do that in desktop software, but like why, you know let the let the the WordPress plugin do that for you.\r\n\r\nSo all of these options, all these options here, either been short pixel, etcetera, all of those will convert to web P for you.\r\n\r\nOkay, if there are no more questions, I will go and find\r\n\r\nmy settings in our base site just a minute. Okey dokey.\r\n\r\nI'll actually see Yeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. So here's my base site.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm just so we're at settings an E dub. And it's really that y'all it's ugly, ugly plugin, but it's does all the things. Okay. So the first thing I do is there's a button up here called Ludicrous mode. And that's what I go into to get all the settings available because I really want granular control over what Edom is doing. So that's what you see here. If you first load the plugin, you're not going to see all these extra settings, but I'm in Ludicrous Mode. I've dropped in my API key. This by the way, is the only thing that makes this premium is the plugin is the same from free to premium. It's when you drop in your API key that you'll get when you buy a license. That's what bumps up your level to get better compression. So there's all this extra stuff here by the way.\r\n\r\nEDA includes a thing called Twist performance, that's an optimizer. Also easy IO, which is image optimizing CDN. I've not gotten into any of those things I don't. For my use case, it's not helpful, but it's got all these extra things you might want to take a look at so I will, I'm just gonna go straight down each page and let you see the settings I use. So I remove all the metadata, all the all the extra meta that's in photos, just it makes them smaller. We're going to set our max width and height at 2560.\r\n\r\nSo this way, if somebody uploads a seven megapixel image, it's going to reduce it down to size and get rid of the large size. So this is helpful to add the height width dimensions into the image as it's loaded on the front end to reduce cumulative layout shifts. We're also going to turn on lazy loading and automatic scaling. A scrolling down this is where we turn on web T.\r\n\r\nWe're also I've found that these two checkmark checkboxes help with web P loading correctly.\r\n\r\nAnd so actually, we don't have the next thing set here. Save this, it's if it's\r\n\r\nthere's usually right here and it's probably because of the environment we're in right here. But there's usually a box that shows if Web UI is working or not.\r\n\r\nThat should be showing up here but it's not.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's move to local. This is where we set our compression levels. This is critical. So JPEG Premium Plus that's the best compression you can get.\r\n\r\nIt's kind of the balance between best looking image and best compression. King same way Premium Plus GIF optimization pixel perfect PDF. This is also nice. This will optimize a PDF, the images inside a PDF that can make it gigantic. This will actually optimize those images and make your PDF significantly smaller without noticeable loss of quality.\r\n\r\nSVG optimization as well we'll turn that on default. And then I want to turn off backup originals because if I don't do that, Edom is going to save the original image and it's just going to make the Media Library even larger and larger. I don't want it to save the originals. In the advanced settings, I don't think there's anything checked here.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nIn the Resize area, you can disable resizes on any of these image sizes that you want.\r\n\r\nAnd you can allow the resizing of existing images not a whole lot here. I don't think I don't think I think these are all the advanced and resize these are all default settings. Convert. Delete originals remove original image from the server after successful conversion. This single function is what got me to move away from Smash years ago, because they weren't doing that and media libraries were getting gigantic.\r\n\r\nAlso, this is really helpful. You'll want to decide if this is what you want to do. But ping to jpg How many of you have had people but we have a magazine site that we do and they are horrible about doing a screenshot of an image and then uploading that ping. And it's massive, right? It should be like a 50k. jpg, and it's like a one megabit one megabyte ping file. So this will automatically detect that if it's not like a background like a like a image on a on a background.\r\n\r\nThat should be a ping, it converts it to a JPEG automatically. So I like that a lot.\r\n\r\nAlso gift to ping conversion like this. No warnings here. Just do it. If somebody uploads a GIF convert it to a ping and that's it.\r\n\r\nLet's see here override. I didn't change anything here from the default. I don't believe that goes up to a whole new thing. That's it. Yep. So those are my settings.\r\n\r\nThat's it now once if you put it up on a site that has something else has been on before, you can go down here to bulk optimize, and run the bulk optimizer to see if we need to optimize anything. And it'll run through and do all the optimization for you and through the whole site.\r\n\r\nOkay, well that was all the settings in EDA that didn't take long.\r\n\r\nLet me scroll up see what I missed here.\r\n\r\nShannon is using tiny ping because it's it's included in Nexus hosting channel. I don't know if tiny ping does web p or not.\r\n\r\nI just don't know the answer to that. Oh, and it appears the E dub deal is $10 per month. Not $10. One time I thought that was too good to be true, honestly. Yeah.\r\n\r\nBeth says if I switch from smushed to eat DAB I'm not going to get even more images and copies. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo if you switch from Smash to E dub, there's a couple of things you need to do.\r\n\r\nYou need to go in to the like you have to do this in a file manager or something and get into the file structure and look under wp content because there will be a folder called Smash web P or something like that. I think it's smashed dash web p where smash put all the web pig images that converted you'll need to delete that because at that point, it's just taking up space. It's not helping you. The other thing you'll want to do is go under tools. So before we were under Settings and E dub, now you go under Tools and E dub. And you're going to go through and do remove converted originals. So that's going to wipe out all the big original files that Smosh did not delete for you so you'll want to let E dub re optimize all your images, and then run in here and remove converted originals that'll clean you up.\r\n\r\nDoes that answer your question that you want if you do that you won't have additional images and copies.\r\n\r\nAll right. Any other questions, comments, snide remarks on this? So we've gone a long way today we have we've talked about getting our site spun up, building out all the things we're ready for development. And we've just pretended we built the site and ready to go now we're doing our final speed optimizations for the site. We've walked through what speed optimization looks like, what the priorities are, and, yeah, so it's pretty good, pretty good way that we've come today. Tomorrow again, we'll be starting off with preparing a site for the client and getting the admin area ready for a client to interact with. And then in the last hour tomorrow, we'll be talking through a website launch process, so that we don't forget anything when we launched the site because if you're like me, you have forgotten many things when launching a client site and it's never good. All right, um, let's see, Jeanne will either replace the JPEGs with web P images on the front end? Yes. So that's the point. It will go through. When you upload a JPEG it will convert the jpeg to a web p and then it does its thing in the back end to show web P images on the front end. Yep, that's all done for you. And by the way, most good image optimization plugins, the premium ones are going to do that they have their own way of creating the web p and then making sure that shows on the front end for you.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. I can't believe we're finished five minutes early. This usually takes a lot longer. Maybe I just talked faster today. Hello. Okay, well, that gives you five more minutes to do some things to start working on your site spin up checklist. So I'd encourage you to take that first list. If you want some homework to take home for tonight. Take that first list of a starter spin up process and just pull that into a checklist that you can use. And the next time you deploy your starter site, run through that list, and then make adjustments for yourself as you go. So take some time to do that. I will be back tomorrow, same time one o'clock Central for day two of optimizing your starter site here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome if you're just coming in to zoom, open up the chat and say hello, checking question is what your biggest takeaway from day one was yesterday? Hey, Bill, he just having a checklist. Checklist goes a long way. Yes. All right. So captions should now be working for all.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. Let me hear from you in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from yesterday was? The link for the course handbook is there it's the same link as yesterday. We're on page 19.\r\n\r\nclass time to redo those checklists. Checklists, always they're always in flux. There's all you know, they're a living document. Hopefully you're iterating and making them better every time.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. We're just about a little over a minute before we get started with day two of optimizing your starter site. The link is in the chat for the course handbook\r\n\r\nYeah, so that does make a difference. Oh, yes, Stacy. The global palette CSS is mighty helpful.\r\n\r\nFor sure.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. We're a little less than a minute to go before we get started. Glad you're all here we are talking about optimizing our starter sites day two of the course today. Many many things to show you.\r\n\r\nHave two dogs making noise on the floor. So hopefully they'll keep the racket down.\r\n\r\nAll\r\n\r\nright, glad you're all here today. As you are coming in to zoom out. Let me hear from you in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from yesterday was anything stand out is more helpful than other things. I'd love to hear about that in the chat. We are just about to get started.\r\n\r\nI see that sounds like a good office hours. Question.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's go ahead and get started with day two.\r\n\r\nWelcome everybody today to of optimizing your starter site for 2023. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. And this is our second day of taking our Starter Site to the next level. So last month, we talked all about building that Starter Site is sort of a base for all of our future client work to replicate and move forward this month. We're surrounding that base site with a bunch of processes and checklists to make using it more and more part of our workflow. So we talked yesterday about a spin up process of what is probably the most efficient way to replicate the site and then build out the sections one after another in the in a logical order. Then the we also talked about optimizing doing some speed optimizations and what the priorities should be with that. Now today we're we are going to pretend in this process that we have completed our site, and it's now just about time to turn the site over to the client. So the first hour today we're going to be looking at preparing a site for the client. And in the second hour we'll actually be looking at a launch checklist that you can use to one step at a time. I get that site live. So that's where we're heading today. We have a lot to talk about. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello, I am dropping in once again, the slides for today or the course handbook for today. And the replay link. It usually takes about an hour or so to get that up when we're done. We'll we'll have that up for you to review directly then as it does all the rendering and gets ready to go.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's talk today about getting a site ready to hand over to the client, the whole pre launch process. So let's start with a pretty foundational question. It is one that is frequently debated in Facebook groups that cater to people like us. And it's all about you know, should you really give a client access as an admin to the back end of their site. And there's lots of different opinions on this. Some people believe that only you as a developer ought to have this access. Others believe that clients ought to be given admin access. And I think my opinion on this has not changed for many years. It really comes down to so many times we deal with a rescue site where the developer has disappeared. Or maybe it's even a situation where there's an adversarial relationship between the developer and a client. And you know, there's a problem there. And when a client doesn't have admin access to a site that they have purchased, that creates a problem that really puts the client in a bad situation. So I just believe as a matter of principle that clients ought to have admin access for the website that they own. Right. It's their website. It's like, you can rent this office but you can't have the keys. That just doesn't make sense, right.\r\n\r\nthey've purchased this website it belongs to them, they ought to have an administrator login. Now, with that comes the caveat of should the client log in as an admin to make edits to their website? Absolutely not. So I give clients and administrator login but only for use in case of emergency so if we get hit, somebody gets hit by bus like I'm not around anymore. The my whole business falls apart, whatever. At least the client has something you know, some way to get in and do something to the website. So I create the admin user but I also create an editor user that is for the typical logging in for the client to the website to make changes. And so there's even a stipulation in the contract that says if you break things as an admin, it's billable, right? So we're not beyond restoring a backup. We're not going to fix anything that you do if you log in as administrator. This is not for the logging into your website and making changes. So that's the way I approach that I'm happy to entertain questions about that in the chat. But I feel like that's a fairly common approach. And it just makes the most sense to me.\r\n\r\nSo once we get over the fact, you know, how are we going to give the client access? Let's make it a little prettier for them, shall we? So I think the next thing we need to start thinking about is we're preparing a site for the client is customizing the login experience. With a few just a few minutes of your time, just like customizing a 404 page, customizing the standard plain WordPress login page. Doesn't take long and you can really do some nice stuff with a really good plugin. So just a few small details, like just adding the client's branding colors will go that sort of thing. It just, it's an extra little touch. And it's something that I would recommend doing so there's plenty of code snippets that lets you change out the logo. There's a number of different plugins that will allow you to change how the login area looks. This is the one that I currently am a fan of it's called login page, our custom login page Customizer by Hardeep us Ronnie now for a long time we had recommended another plugin, that one has had a few issues and there's there's a lot of upgrade nags that that plugin is starting to create. So we actually featured this on a plugin roundup a few months back, and this is the one that I think is a really good one to use. So let me make some space here. And we'll get over here and activate login page customizer.\r\n\r\nThis by the way is a plugin that has a lot of installs and and good ratings. It's 90,000 install base. You know there's a lot of folks using this plugin. So we're gonna skip the Freemius stuff here. And we now have a this is the only thing I don't like about this plugin. It does add a top level menu item, but we're gonna hide that in a minute anyway, so here's login page customizer. And so there's a number of things that we can take a look at as far as settings. Do we want to keep the Remember Me option. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Do you want to have both user name and email address or just one of the other as options to log in. We'll use both and delete all the settings if you want to install Okay, so just we're leaving the basic settings here. And we're going to go here into our pages or actually, we're gonna go to customizer. Now, one of the things that this and most of the plugins that do login page customizations using the customizer, the approach that they take, is that there actually yes is a page.\r\n\r\nLet me go back here and I'll show you here in the\r\n\r\nthere is a page called login customizer now, what happens, and I don't know if you can, so you can see, I don't know if that's automatically left out of the sitemap or not that Sue's question is, you know, is this going to show up in the sitemap? And I think once we turn on something like Yoast, and if we edit this page now, I think and this would be something you'd want to do in your base site. But we can just go down here and tell it Hello, are you advance?\r\n\r\nDon't show this in the search results. Don't follow any links did actually this is all really need. Okay, so we can do that one time in our base site. And yeah, and most SEO plugins have a way to remove a page from being indexed in the sitemap that they create. So that's what I would do there. Do it in your base site. That way it's never going to be listed.\r\n\r\nSo yeah.\r\n\r\nAnd by the way, it's not a a real page in the sense like it's listed in pages, but you can't access that page. Unless you're logged in. It forces you to the homepage as I recall or someplace. Like if we go to this link, and we do an incognito window\r\n\r\nso it forwards you to the homepage. So it's not a big deal. Either way, but this keeps out of the sitemap even if it's in the sitemap it's just going to track as a redirect back to your your homepage. It's not a big deal. But here's the plugin. It works pretty nicely. You can start off with some templates here. You like the regular WordPress view? Do you want to do a background color? You know how do you want to do this? Well, let's just do let's start off here. And our background we can do a color we can do an image if we want. Let's do something like Oh no, this is kind of cool.\r\n\r\nDrop that in\r\n\r\nokay, it's not my favorite but it'll work.\r\n\r\nSo you can make some changes there regarding the background.\r\n\r\nYou can change out here the logo to something else if you'd like we'll just drop in. This isn't gonna work well because it's dark on dark but you get the idea. We can make the logo more bigger, etc. You got padding and so forth. Where does the logo click take you? Yeah, so or you can just disable the logo altogether if you'd like.\r\n\r\nSo it just drops you straight down through here and we want to put a background image on the forum. You can do that even if you'd like to that's kind of interesting. Otherwise you can set the color the padding all you have control over all of these items. Right here in a standard\r\n\r\ncustomizer.\r\n\r\nYeah, that works really nicely.\r\n\r\nClicking the button settings you have all the options here. So the one thing I like about this one also is that you can even put in your own custom CSS right here in this plugin. That's something the other plugin did not offer. So kind of cool. You can spend a little time you see how quickly like oftentimes what I'll do is whatever hero image I'm using on the homepage, I'll put that in the login page. It's kind of nice drop in the client logo. Good to go. Pretty neat. Yeah, Tina was saying the old customizer plugin you could\r\n\r\nyou weren't able to edit the login page in the customizer. Okay, I'm not sure about that. Just try this new plugin, but it'll probably work better for you.\r\n\r\nAlright, so it makes sense. Just spend an extra couple of minutes here. As you're wrapping up development. It's a nice touch. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is work on cleaning up the website dashboard. Now in last month's course I gave you code snippets that would specifically unset each of the dashboard, the default dashboard widgets in the admin area of the world of WordPress, and you know, that's nice to clean things up. But there are a few other things that I like to clean up in WordPress. You can use a there's a great plugin that I like and I've recommended it for years. It is called advanced Access Manager. This is actually the very first training I ever did years ago here was on this plugin, and it was I think, in 2013. So like 10 years ago, I've been using this plugin for that long on every client site. It's really good I've met the developer. He's a great, great guy, and is committed to this plugin. It has a huge install base. It's rock solid. So let's kind of get into this. So one of the things I like to do, as I'm preparing a site for the client, is to simplify everything like you go into a custom post type and there's all these, you know, Netta boxes along the side that are they don't really pertain to this or we want to hide them or whatever. So let's just clean all that up and make it a lot simpler to use. So even here, like going here in the Add New Page, and you know what, it's it's striking me I'm not sure how this is going to work in the block editor.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna give it a try and see how it's gonna go. Let's go ahead and activate advanced access manager. Okay, it's already active. So there's a few things so working on simplifying all pulling menu items out simplifying meta boxes. There's some good reasons to do that. Just make it easier for your client to use. Also, you can use solid central to simplify menus, that functionality is there. It's been there for years. However, it's user by user unfortunately, it's not by role, and I'd really prefer to set it up by role so that all the editors for example on the on the site that our customer you know, client type logins all get the same menu items hidden. And so you can do with solid central but you have to do it one user at a time. This is something I'm hoping that there'll be tweaking as they are going to be doing some serious work on solid central next year.\r\n\r\nSo let's focus in on a m here.\r\n\r\nThe one thing to be aware of with advanced access manager is is a very large plugin. It does a lot of different things. But the developer has created it in such a way that it's modular so you can turn off the stuff in the plugin that you're not using. And so it doesn't load that code. It makes it very light for the use case that we're going to have. And it's really, really pretty cool. So let's take a look at how to do that. So we're gonna go let's just if we're only using advanced access manager to simplify menus and meta boxes, here's the settings that recommend that you use. So we're gonna go to Advanced Access Manager settings and services settings is here in services is here. Now the first thing I'd suggest that you do is drop this all the way down and just show all the things on one page. Because there are a few that spill over into the next page and you might not realize that and not might not get all the settings. So I would suggest disabling everything other than admin menu and meta boxes and widgets. But we're just going to take a cruise down here so you can see all the things that it does. It does a number of things about securing the WordPress login.\r\n\r\nIt allows it has its own capabilities admin menu we want so that's one of them.\r\n\r\nWe don't want to get into the toolbar management.\r\n\r\nWe don't want it to manage capabilities although we good let's leave that on and I'll show you why that'll be important in just a minute. Turn this off. We don't want to have it changing any access to any URLs or posts in terms like he does so many things.\r\n\r\nWe're not using multi site we don't need shortcodes all like you can redirect based on Access Denied message as you can if you're doing a login redirect, you can use this plugin for that as well. We do want meta boxes and widgets. And we're not going to get into dopey CLI or that or any kind of redirects for log outs or four Oh fours or any of these things. Either. So we really just have these three things on I'm going to leave capabilities in place because I'm going to show you something with that in a minute. This will allow you to add a capability to a user role. And there's something that will be helpful to us with that in just a minute.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we've turned off the services right here. Now we're going to go into our core settings and we're going to disable all\r\n\r\ndisable all that so we don't want to Okay, we are going to leave the capabilities editor on we don't need this we don't need this and we don't need this. Alright, so we're going to turn those things off. We're going to leave on capabilities because we're going to use that in just a minute.\r\n\r\nI've given you some additional information about some of the things that you might want to use an advanced Access Manager. Now again, this is something that I would probably do in the base site. So get these they're going to be the similar for every site. We're going to get that set in the base site. So this part that we just did, will already be there when we replicate it for future work. Right. So let's just reload our page here and we're going to notice that things like for example here.\r\n\r\nThis menu used to be way down here long. So it's really simplified the scope of this plugin and what it's actually doing.\r\n\r\nAll right, so what we're going to do at this point is we're going to jump in to our editor user, so we're going and one thing that's frustrating about this plugin, he does use mystery meat navigation, meaning who knows what these icons mean until you mouse over them a little frustrating. It's always been like this. Anyway, we're going to manage this role.\r\n\r\nSo up here at the top, it tells you what you're working on. If we wanted to.\r\n\r\nIf we wanted to do administrator, you can see we're on that now we're going to work on our editor user.\r\n\r\nAnd what you can see that we're working on here this is our back end menu items. So this is what does the editor role see in this list right here. Now, by the way, if you wanted to do user by user, you can do that. Like here's the only two users on the site. So you could for example, have some settings pertaining to roll. But then on this particular user of that role, it could be even a little different. So that's really helpful.\r\n\r\nThis also, by the way, would let you have a client who has an administrator user, but you're still hiding some things from them. If you wanted to do that.\r\n\r\nAlright, so we are in the editor role, just be sure we're there. Okay. Now, everything here pertains to things that are in this menu. So what I like to do is go down and notice this is grayed out because typically the editor doesn't have access to the stream menu settings, I like to just go ahead and restrict it anyway. And if you've been an advanced Access Manager user before, what you may realize, okay, this has changed these used to be checkboxes. Now there's an open lock and a closed lock which is a little better of a UI, because you used to have to check the box and checking on means turning off and it wasn't not quite intuitive.\r\n\r\nLike one of the things I would do here is okay, in most client sites that we have, we use in posts we use categories but not tags. So I'm going to just turn off the tags menu, because they don't need it.\r\n\r\nMedia, right forms. We're going to come back to this one in just a minute.\r\n\r\nPages are good. I don't want them to see this menu. Under Appearance. I don't want them to see themes or widgets or this will give them elements.\r\n\r\nI don't want them to get in the customizer will let them edit menus, but I don't want them in the Kadence settings. So we can turn off all those submenu items. We do not by any means want them in the Plugins menu.\r\n\r\nUsers will leave alone tools we don't want them in that settings. We don't want them in that. Yoast SEO we'll leave alone for now. Advanced Access Manager definitely restrict Oops, no I didn't.\r\n\r\nCome back. Editor am we want this restricted? Yes. Backups. I don't want them to see that.\r\n\r\nKadence blocks. Let's lock them out of that in private site. It won't be there anyway when we launched but we'll go from there. Okay, now let's see how this actually looks. I'm gonna go over here to my list. And I've got a plug in active called user switching.\r\n\r\nAnd this is a classic plugin we've used for a long time. It's in the base stack that I gave you last month and what this gives us is a context link under editor or we can easily just switch to this user. So let's switch and see how Cloudflare see how our menu is simplified. Now.\r\n\r\nAll those things just aren't there. We don't have tags. It's a very simple menu. We hire and I explain this to the client. We create this editor user for you where all the breakable parts of WordPress are hidden then you can't accidentally get into something and change a setting that breaks your website.\r\n\r\nMy clients are typically happy that we do this for them. You know they don't want to accidentally break their website Ceu do I block them from Kadence blocks? No, no, just that menu item. They don't really typically need that.\r\n\r\nYou can still use Kadence blocks in the editor that was only hiding the menu.\r\n\r\nAnd if you want to do it differently, you can no big deal let's go back to and by the way, the great thing about user switching is that in three places you can get back to your user if you're on the front end.\r\n\r\nHere under the Profile menu, you can switch back, same on the back end and then same right here. So I'm gonna go right back to the user that I just had.\r\n\r\nAll good back to admin. Alright, does that make sense everybody?\r\n\r\nSo we've cleaned up our admin menu for all users in the role of editor. But now also we want to go into meta boxes in widgets.\r\n\r\nAnd here, you'll notice all right, these are the actual front end widgets like in the well appearance, and widgets, these old classic widgets. I really don't. They don't have access to that anyway, so you can with this plugin, hide certain widgets from use.\r\n\r\nWidgets are kind of going going away so we just kind of leave that alone. They don't really have access to those anyway. Here you can see oh, look, we've got dashboard widgets. These are the ones that actually appear here on the WordPress dashboard. So you could hide some of those if you want it to hear, but really what I'm after, are the meta boxes on the individual post types. And these are helpful that I It occurs to me I'm not sure what's going to happen with the block editor here. But I'm going to because they're not really meta boxes. I'm gonna hide tags, custom fields.\r\n\r\nExcerpt Yeah, let's just hide those and see what happens. Because I'm not sure actually.\r\n\r\nI'm second guessing myself on whether this works in the block editor or not. So if we go to add new post, let's see if tags shows up over on over here. Yes, it does. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo that's if you're using the block editor. This is not nearly as helpful as it used to be. But one thing it does do is if you have if you're creating a custom post type that's typically arranged in more of the classic editor view, where it has the traditional metal boxes, and I love to clean up especially custom post types for clients because, you know, will oftentimes have a single block of custom fields for a custom post type, and just hide everything else. And so it's a really nice way to clean those things up.\r\n\r\nAnd the idea is just get Declutter. Get all the stuff out of the way as much as possible. And I'm going to make a note to reach out to vassal about the developer about hiding these things on the back end now Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, was the first time you load advanced Access Manager on a site, it won't see any of these things yet and you have to click refresh. And that way it goes out to the database and it pulls in Oh, good. Patient error. It pulls in all of the registered.\r\n\r\nWhat did that oh, I'm logged in? Yep. Okay.\r\n\r\nI was switched over to the whole man. Am I broken? Let's try this again. I was on the editor user. Okay, now I'm back. Now it should load fine.\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go.\r\n\r\nSo, make sure you hit refresh, because it'll go out and pull out all of the Define meta boxes and widgets and so forth into this area.\r\n\r\nAll right. So the other thing to be aware of here, how many of you have noticed that if you activate Yoast SEO, a whole bunch of more well, actually just two but two new user roles are created SEO editor and SEO manager. I don't like that. I don't like all those extra roles on my site. It's just a personal thing. So what I do and I do this in the base site, because we've set up Yoast SEO, and these roles are created what you can do is actually delete these roles right here. So advanced access manager gives you the ability to create and delete roles in WordPress, all built into the plugin. So I'm going to delete the SEO editor role. Yes.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm going to delete the SEO manager role.\r\n\r\nNow this does create a problem because SEO editor and SEO manager are like the WordPress editor role but it has an additional capability and it is the WP SEO manage options. So this is why I left capabilities on a minute ago. I'm going to go over here into capabilities. And again, we're editing the role editor here. And I'm going to give my editor user that SEO capability. So right here, SEO manage options. I can click that checkbox. And now my standard WordPress editor role has all the capabilities that it needs to access the Yoast options. Does that make sense to everybody?\r\n\r\nkind of clean up the roles.\r\n\r\nYoast does it this way so that certain users can edit the settings\r\n\r\nSue does it recognize Gravity Forms for the editor know what let me show you here.\r\n\r\nIf I thought I had this in the guide\r\n\r\nOh no, that's it's actually a code snippet. Sue, I gave it last month where you can give editor users full access to Gravity Forms.\r\n\r\nShannon does it work with WooCommerce roles? Absolutely. So let's just add WooCommerce and we'll see those new roles pop up over here.\r\n\r\nSo it doesn't the roles aren't goodness. The roles are not defined on the site yet, which is why advanced access manager didn't see it. But as soon as we install and activate WooCommerce we should see those roles appear.\r\n\r\nThat's gonna get us into this wizard we're going to try to jump out of the WooCommerce Setup Wizard.\r\n\r\nIt's creating all the stuff right now\r\n\r\nokay, while it's doing its thing, I'm just going to reload the page here. And we ought to see\r\n\r\nYep, so there's shop manager here.\r\n\r\nAnd I think there's some WooCommerce capabilities. Yeah, right here. So you could we could give our editor these two WooCommerce capabilities, and then we wouldn't need the shop manager role.\r\n\r\nStacy, can you manage Gravity Forms roles, okay? Gravity Forms doesn't have rolls that are associated with it. Notice, Gravity Forms is active. There are no new roles over here. But by default Gravity Forms only allows administrators into some of the settings areas and I like to give editors some of that because editors, for example, only Gravity Forms admin it only administrators can go into Gravity Forms and export form entries. And I like for editors to be able to do that because the client may want to go in and export some of the form data, right? That makes sense. So the code snippet that I gave you last month is what you need to allow editors to do that. It's not something you can manage and roles and capabilities here.\r\n\r\nAll right. Any other questions with this part? Shannon did that get your question?\r\n\r\nA lot of times plugins have hidden roles that help you granularly customize things. And if they're not added to WordPress, you can create this cape a capability right here. And it can be anything like tests\r\n\r\nlike this great the roll. And it is now that capability which doesn't do anything, but it is here in WordPress and usable. And I can assign it to whatever roles that I want and this capability is something that a plugin could say if user can this capability name then do this. So that's how these things are used in WordPress. And so if you need for some reason to add a capability to granularly control what a plugin is doing. Advanced Access Manager lets you do that also. And you can also delete capabilities completely out of WordPress.\r\n\r\nLike that.\r\n\r\nWhat is the line at the top that says changes are permanent? Yeah.\r\n\r\nJust like it says here what I just did by adding or by deleting the capability. It's permanent. I can add it back. But there's no undo in other words\r\n\r\nso he's just suggesting, be sure you have a backup before you start goofing around with capabilities. Oh no. So like we just deleted it. And we could just we could add it back again right here like here's what I just did. I can add it and it's back.\r\n\r\nYep, but it does make permanent. What he's saying is, it does make permanent changes to the database when you do this. So just always have a backup.\r\n\r\nThat's just a good rule of thumb no matter what. Okay? make sense to everybody. And again, these are things that I would probably do most of everything we just did would be settings that I would have in the base site. There just wasn't time last month to go through all of this. But it's a good example of okay, I'm preparing a site for the client. I see all these things I need to do really, okay, I need to make those in my base site also. So that next time I replicate the site, those settings are already done. I never have to do them again. So that's the takeaway. Make sense? Everybody? Everybody good with that?\r\n\r\nAlright, a couple of things here. I'm just going to mention if you want to hide certain blocks and let's let's face it with all the blocks that are available in Core Plus, if you got Kadence blocks or some other block packages, you can have 8 million blocks right and it's almost it's almost overwhelming how many blocks can be in that list. So here's a great plugin. We did this on the plugin roundup A while back, it's Block Manager and Block Manager will let you turn off certain blocks and make them not available in the the selector in the block editor so you can really streamline you know, go through there and see, you know, what am I actually going to use and not like if you're using Kadence. Maybe you don't want to have the standard heading block. You want to use the advanced text block because it's better, right those sorts of things and just kind of clear out, get rid of any redundant blocks and just make things easier to use.\r\n\r\nWidget disabled works the same way with classic WordPress widgets. If you want to get rid of those. You can also do that with advanced access manager. And again, it does the same thing. There. Okay, so adding some help videos. This is always a good thing to do for your clients. For years. I've used video user manuals, it is something that we refer clients to semi regularly. It is a premium plugin. We do have a deal I verified this a couple of weeks ago that it's still working, but video user manuals.com\/i themes gets you a deal like $100 off per year. So it's basically $12 a month and you get these regularly updated videos in the dashboard. They work really really well and if you're a beaver builder Gravity Forms user they also have videos about beaver builder and gravity forms that have WooCommerce videos. It's really good. So I recommend this saves a lot of time. There's also a an actual manual for people who like to read stuff that's all it's all built in. It's all automatically update as WordPress changes. There's videos for the block editor and for the classic editor, and you can choose like if the site's not running WooCommerce You can deselect the WooCommerce videos and they won't show up so it's really good does it include Elementor instructions? No, it does not. So it's for serious developers.\r\n\r\nJust kidding. Okay.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAll right. Good on that. Now, I mentioned this a little bit last month as well with using customized help videos. We like the WP help plug in. Right here. It was in the stack last month. And it's a really nice thing to be able to record a loom video or something like loom and then just drop it right in one of these publishing help posts and have a you know, customized, customized help videos for the parts of WordPress that you have tweaked for your client, or here's how you do this. Like maybe you've got a custom post type that's special and it's got these custom fields to do a certain thing on the front end of the site. record a quick video as you're preparing the site for the client of just how these things work. Save it done. That way it's gonna save you time because they're not going to remember how you told them how to do it, but you got a video right there in the dashboard makes it easy.\r\n\r\nOh and by the way if you are already paying for a Vimeo membership, hopefully you've seen their screen recorder. It's free works with Zoom. It's just like a automate works with Vimeo. It's just like loom where you can do a quick screen and then it pushes it out to your Vimeo account. Pretty cool.\r\n\r\nSomething else to consider as we're preparing the site for the client is monitoring client activity. This is definitely something to consider doing. First, first line of defense. If you're running solid security you already have reasonably good user logging in so it's part of the core features of solid security under security logs, all events user logging, and then you can filter it down. Good basic information here. However, if you want some more granular information that's why last month I recommended the stream plugin. This will I mean you get way way way more granular data than the I iThemes part of the solid security log creates because they're designed for two different purposes. The solid security log is there for security logging primarily stream is there to show you exactly the very, very granular things that you did like this was just when I activated WooCommerce you see all the things that happened when I did that.\r\n\r\nYeah, pretty, pretty significant list. Its screen is also really handy. Because you can set up alerts based on certain conditions. So when maybe the client, the editor user\r\n\r\nlet's see when they are let's just say this. Let's pretend like this is the clients administrator user. And if they log in with their administrator user, email me, I want to know that this is super helpful. Right? So like, if you're if my client is logging in with that admin user that I told him was only using case of emergencies, send me an email and let me know so I can go in and see what's going on here. Right. So you can set this up to trigger under lots of different paces. You can have it send you if you're using slack, you can have it push a Slack notice if you're using IFFT it can do a lot of different things. Like it can connect to a Google sheet. And it can log the whatever over here into a Google sheet for you. It's really cool, what stuff you can do there. But anyway, or you can just say hi like this in the log. But there's a lot of things you can do here to set up stream for how you want to track your clients. And so, again for the most part, I would try to have these settings in the base site. But then as you're preparing this site for the client, just go through and make sure that it's tracking and alerting you for the things that this particular site should alert you to All right how about this one, creating a custom dashboard widget.\r\n\r\nWhy should you do this because it's friendly and helpful. And we did that last month and it's cool to have your branding on the dashboard. That's really good.\r\n\r\nThere's a couple of other ways to take though this dashboard widget that we created last month.\r\n\r\nWhere is it? My turned off?\r\n\r\nNo.\r\n\r\nMaybe I pulled it maybe I pulled it from the code anyway. You remember that the widget with the logo and all those things in there we did last month. It's great. No problem but there's a there are better ways to do it.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll start if you're using a page builder. So if you're using Beaver Builder or Elementor Here you go, Beth, you can do this with Elementor. There's a couple of plugins that were created by idea box, which is the creator of power pack for Beaver Builder for Elementor.\r\n\r\nAnd the idea box people have made it such that you can take a saved row or template or whatever Elementor calls it and display that in the dashboard. And it shows up right here. At the top of the dashboard. And it's really nice. You can create your own layout with columns and graphics and buttons and tabs and whatever you want with your page builder and lay it right here on the dashboard. It's really kind of cool.\r\n\r\nHowever, and this is where I want to spend a little bit of time now I have created a plugin that allows you to use a Kadence element for that. So if you're not in a page builder and you're using Kadence blocks, or if you're just using the Kadence theme at all. There hasn't been a way to get a block editor driven client dashboard to show up in WordPress. And so the way I had to kind of go around the world for this to make this happen in this, okay. This plugin is very, very, very, very beta okay. If it breaks your sight, I don't want to hear about it like it's this is you use it on your own risk, okay? However, it's pretty solid for my testing, but I haven't tested it in lots of different environments either. Okay, so no guarantees, no warranties, no support. Like it's on you. Okay. But yeah, it's a very simple plugin. There are three files. There's a PHP file, a JavaScript file and a CSS file. And you can drop all that in chat GPT like I taught you a couple of months ago and tweak it and you know, fiddle around with it, make it your own. But the challenge here and I've even talked to Ben Rittner, about this several months ago, of getting a Kadence element to show up in the dashboard.\r\n\r\nThe problem is like it will work with a shortcode you know, Kadence elements makes a shortcode you could put that in a dashboard box, and it would render something out. However, any of the columns anything like that don't work, because that's relying on CSS and JavaScript that is only loaded on the front end of the site, which makes sense. The block editor only loads that CSS and JavaScript on the front end it's not loading it in the admin area. And it's really, it's really complicated to get that CSS and JavaScript to load in the back end. So it's, it's just, that's not a great way to do it. So what I did was, I put it in an iframe, right? So we can go and we can look at let's just create a Kadence element\r\n\r\nand we will call it Wyant dashboard\r\n\r\nand we'll make it a Content section.\r\n\r\nAnd you can design just like you would with with anything else here. So let's just make I don't know, let's do a three column layout. Over here. We'll do an image. We'll drop in our logo.\r\n\r\nWe'll put in some text here.\r\n\r\nAnd over here, maybe we put our support form we created last month. It will drop into gravity form.\r\n\r\nAnd we're going to watch oops, that one\r\n\r\nthere that wants to form title or form description.\r\n\r\nWe have a really simple dashboard widget here. Right? Now when we get this dashboard created\r\n\r\nyou can view it on the front end it has a URL. So it's you know domain with a question mark Kadence element equals and then whatever you call it the slug, right. So here's our dashboard. It's not awesome, but it's got some stuff. Okay, see where I'm going with this. So now I've given you a link to download the plugin. It is in. It's in Dropbox, you have to click the little download arrow at the top, that Dropbox is probably actually going to uncompress the zip file for you to see what's there in the browser, but there's a little link at the top. Actually, I'll just show you. There's a little link at the top right.\r\n\r\nDid you do to download so click that to download the zip file. But you can see how simple if there's a PHP file, there's a single CSS file.\r\n\r\nAnd there's a single JavaScript file. So it's three three files. Very, very simple plugin, which chat GPT and I created with much anguish over the course of several weeks.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to activate well. It's actually already activated brilliant dashboard is activated. So there's now a settings page here called brilliant dashboard. And the first thing I'm going to do I've got this feature here, which is hide dashboard. Widgets. So if I do that and I go to my dashboard screen notice all my widgets are gone. There's not even a little empty boxes. So this hides everything and even hides the help and Screen Options.\r\n\r\nGet rid of that notice the help and screen options that would have been right there. Right. So we want to make gotta make room just for our thing. Now the second thing this is going to do is it gives us a list of all the Kadence elements currently set up on the site. And here's one we just made client dashboard. I'm going to save that and that's going to load will have too many windows up and that's gonna load it right here.\r\n\r\nBoom, look at that. Okay, we have some margin issues. So let's tweak that.\r\n\r\nYou\r\n\r\nhere's our row. Let's put some padding on our left and right.\r\n\r\nMedium on each and that'll give us a little extra room over here.\r\n\r\nOh, look at that. See where we're at now in that that quick really fast. This is a place you could drop in video. You can do anything here that you can do in the block editor. Pretty cool. Now Sue is asking can you leave it like Yes. So that's why I actually made this option. So if we uncheck this, that's going to show our stuff up here again, and it drops in our dashboard underneath this. So that's, you know, this hides or shows the standard dashboard widgets. So maybe you want both, just leave it unchecked.\r\n\r\nNow what I might do in a later iteration of the plugin is have two checkboxes. One of them says Hide screen options and help and the other one says Hide dashboard widgets for now I just have the one.\r\n\r\nBut that's how it works.\r\n\r\nSo think about all the things you can add in here. And you're only constrained by what the block editor can do. So let me show you what I did.\r\n\r\nThere's a second one in here. I'm just going to there's another element that I created with a slightly more has more features to it. So let's refresh this page. And how about this. There's a tabbed interface at the top.\r\n\r\nSo here's our main page, with buttons and whatever you want. You need help here's a place to ask for help. But look here what if you had a look or studio dashboard for this site\r\n\r\nall this is is an HTML box, an HTML block\r\n\r\nin which I put the embed that Looker Studio gives us So drop in your analytics right here and all of this you know it's it's just like any other Looker dashboard in that cool\r\n\r\nso you do have to be careful. One of the things here is we're dealing with multiple iframes. This is actually an iframe inside of an iframe. It totally works 100% There's no problems. But sometimes the scrolling can be wonky. You just kind of have to if I were going to do this live, I would have a very my look or studio would have a lot of different icons here perhaps, and it would not require a lot of vertical scrolling. So anyway, what I'm trying to do is give you some ideas of how you might use this. So it's again this is just the block editor and it's pushing it out here right there. So\r\n\r\nall right, we have reached a good point for stoppage for a break.\r\n\r\nquestions or questions or comments before we take a break class is asking when is the final version coming? I don't know man.\r\n\r\nI next week, I intend not to do any work whatsoever. Actually, I'm officially as of about 11 o'clock, to about two three hours ago I put in my vacation notice.\r\n\r\nSo I'm not doing much client work. I'm trying not to do very much at all the last few weeks of the of the year. But yeah, I don't know. Definitely not next week.\r\n\r\nThis isn't one of those things. I'm not sure when it's ever going to be final.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, questions comments? Let's see gene recommendation on how to get started with Looker studio. Ah, excellent question. We just happen to have a solid Academy course on this. If you look right here, Google Analytics bootcamp with David Zimmerman. The link is in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe looked at on day two\r\n\r\nDavid got into Looker studio here and he gave us a looker dashboard.\r\n\r\nIn this one didn't he do something with Looker and this one\r\n\r\nI could be wrong\r\n\r\nYeah, I'm pretty sure it's in this Google Analytics bootcamp.\r\n\r\nYeah, cuz we talked about setting up Yeah, and he even gave us a How many of you have used David's dashboard the basic dashboard like he gave us a link and everything would would a premium training on Looker be good for next year? I'm really struggling to put training together for next year.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, that sounds like a lot of yeses. All right. We can sure pull that off\r\n\r\nokay. All right. Any other questions before we get into the launch process\r\n\r\nJean that course also covers that, David in when he talks about in day one or two, one of the days. David talks about goal tracking goals and conversions. So that's the end of day one is what you're looking for here.\r\n\r\nIt's very it's much much much easier to set up goals in Google Analytics. Four than it was previously. Much easier.\r\n\r\nYes, or you can use Google Tag Manager, Stacy is suggesting Okay, anybody else before we take a quick break?\r\n\r\nOkay, Okey dokey. Well, it is just about three minutes till let's take an eight minute break. We're back at five minutes after so break until 205 Central time and we are quiet until then.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, we're back. Final hour of optimizing your starter site for 2023. Who's ready to go let's get this site launched our pretend site that we've been not working on for the past couple of days here. So launch process is absolutely critical. It was the very first checklist I ever made in my business because I realized every time I launched a website, I was forgetting something. And Murphy's Law says that the one thing you forget when you launch a site is probably the most important thing that you should have done. So that's what started me years. ago on this journey of creating checklists and processes. Because what I learned, especially with the launch checklist was I started out just dumping all the things that I need to do into a list and that's great. But then I started to realize, well, if I take number eight and move it up to number three, it actually makes more sense because I'm already in that area or you know, it works better in the flow. And just gradually over the years. I probably started this website checklist. Nine years ago, I would I would imagine something around Yeah, Brown 2013 2014 as when I started this, and I've just iterated slowly, and now it's kind of in three phases. There's the pre launch list, the launch list and the post launch list, which you know, theoretically could be done independently of one another, which is pretty good. So like will often run their pre launch prior to the client giving final sign off on the site.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, okay, so let's talk about this checklist. And you are welcome to use this however, like all these checklists are list of processes have been take it, tweak it, make it your own, make it fit your work, but I think this one in particular I think is just about dialed in to where it should be. So let's talk about some pre launch items for our checklist. And we're this is things that you could do day or two or the day of launch, and we're gonna start with just some checks. So we're gonna go into the domain name and update the TTL just to make sure there's not any delays with DNS propagation to as low as the DNS provider will allow you to go. Many will let you do 300 This number is always in seconds. So that's five minutes. Some will let you do last but most 300 is the lowest it'll go ahead and get that domain set low. At this point, go ahead and run your full backup and download it to local so if you're developing on some server out there, download it to right here so it's on your computer just in case something happens the percentage chance that something will go wrong is directly proportional to whether or not you downloaded that backup. Trust me. Also, next thing we're going to do, this is a big one. We're going to look at every single form or anything else that's going to send email notifications about anything. And just make sure that all the emails are right, that they're going to the right place that not only that but that the from email address matches the domain that the site will be on when it's live. And go ahead and put even though it's in the development domain right now. Go ahead and put the live domain in those form fields where it's going because sometimes if you do a search under plug in the solid backups process and in many backup plugins restoration process, they could depending on how the plugin does it they these might not get updated. If the plugin serializes that information in the database, you can't really find and replace it and sometimes they do that. So anyway, that's why I just say look at everything on the site that's going to send notification emails, make sure those emails are correct. ability. Why are we doing TTL so that when you actually flip the domain, the change happens as fast as possible. Yeah. So oftentimes, the the default for TTL ELLs is four hours, or what is that? Multiply that into seconds?\r\n\r\nAnd it's that number I forget. I forget what it is. But yeah, so why does it take my domain four hours to check well, because you didn't change the TTL. So go ahead and drop that down. You can even do this days ahead of time.\r\n\r\nIt's not gonna hurt anything. All right. So we're also going to check the admin email and on the WordPress side, it's Settings General make sure that is correct where it should be. If it is a rebuild, this is a good time to make sure you've got your redirects Correct. You might have done this already in the development process, but if not, we'll do it as pre launch. If it's a simple site, go out there, build our list of current URLs, make sure they're mapped to the new URLs on the new site, import that into the redirection plugin.\r\n\r\nGo through and make sure all the special pages are set up like our custom login for a four page search results human sitemap, and that the human Sitemap has all the necessary content that it should have. So we're basically just checking our work on these things, making sure these special items are set up. Make sure all our images have alt text unless they are decorative. So we're gonna go through the media library, make sure those are all done.\r\n\r\nCheck e dub or your image optimizer to make sure all the images are optimized and verify on the front end. That web P is working. And oh my goodness, do not forget this. If you're processing payments, make sure that the live adult that the that all the keys are right and especially the web hook, so you got to make sure that the web hook for test and live. Both of those things are set up for the live domain and put into the settings of whatever is processing payments on your site. So don't miss that. All right, so that is our pre launch check list. So now we're actually Oh, Tania, that's later in the list. Yep. So and I'll show you why it's later in a minute.\r\n\r\nSo at this point, we've got our development site. Ready, done. It's everything's checked, everything's ready. So we're going to go over to our new target server where this thing is going to live. We're going to set up the domain over there in my world that would be setting up a cpanel whatever host you do that's do the same thing. I set up the domain there. Go ahead and whatever the passwords are you created for that domain. At this point while you just did it, go ahead and add it into your password manager and into your code editor. Like I use Nova said login and check, do code text editing. Just get all that stuff set up. Now, while you just had the password it's gonna save you time later. Go ahead on in this new environment, set up your new database and user save those credentials to the side for importing later. If you're in cPanel How many times have I done this? Make sure that if you're in cPanel, one second here, all right. If you're in cPanel, and you've just to say we've just set up this new cPanel for the new site, open up File Manager, go into settings and make sure that show dot files is enabled because more than once more than once on a live webinar. I have gone in going where the world is the htaccess file. Oh I forgot to turn on dotfiles just go do it. Now. It's just better to get that done. Because you're already in the new environment. Go ahead and do your dot files. And make sure this is very important. In some hosts. When you deploy a new environment set up a new cPanel there's going to be an existing htaccess file there delete that, because it could interfere with your migration process later.\r\n\r\nAll right, next thing I'm going to do is in my dev site, I'm going to set up solid security, verify those Notification Center emails. Make sure that so a lot of times when we're doing development we'll go ahead and have auto updates turned on with solid security and just let it be keeping everything updated in development. We're going to turn that off at this point because we want to manually run updates on the live site. And I'm going to make sure that we have the setting in solid security my favorite setting in the world which is\r\n\r\noh it's not active. Well nuts\r\n\r\nthe the version management setting where it says update if vulnerability exists so that security this ought to be in your base site. Do not want to go through this.\r\n\r\nOkay, well I'm just gonna ignore that. But you know what I'm talking about right under version management at the very bottom, auto update. It fixes vulnerability. Make sure that's on because that is the best setting in solid security. I want to go ahead and change my user's password on the site. Save that someplace, update the salts. Now this is something to do step by step, okay. And I put these two together for a reason. Because here's what you'll do. You go in you will update your password. You'll save it right at that moment. Go in and update your salts because that's going to log you out. And now you can paste in your password. And when you log in your password manager should prompt you to save the new password. Isn't that cool? But do it that way makes it makes things work a lot better. And you absolutely want to update your salts. Otherwise, all of your sites built out of the base site will have the same salts and that's just bad. So you can update your salts from within solid security. You can just search at the top there for salts and it'll give you the right spot. Click the button you're good to go. While you're in solid security, go ahead and set up your CAPTCHA with whatever CAPTCHA option that you're using. I like Cloudflare turnstyle, pick your poison, and then I'm going to deactivate solid security before I migrate.\r\n\r\nEvery now and then in weird situations. We've had solid security get in the way of a migration or something wasn't quite right. And so we've just started deactivate solid security and then once we launched, we reactivate it and it just is smoother that way.\r\n\r\nAll right at this point, if we've not already created a Google Analytics for property for the site, or if it's brand new and doesn't have one, we'll go ahead and create that property. Now. Create a Tag Manager property if that's what you're using.\r\n\r\nAdd the codes or the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics to Kadence. Now remember, one of the things we did in our base site is we created a Kadence element. Remember this one called Analytics code. And this is an HTML it's a code block, and we would paste here\r\n\r\nour code and this should already be set based on the settings in your base site, the show up in the header on the entire site for logged out users. And this is just a great way to do this. Like if I'm logged in, I don't want to tracking me. It's a great way to rule out the tracking of any logged in users, you your client, whatever now, if this is a site where it's a membership site, or an E commerce site, where actual customers are logging in, then you're going to want this to be all users, obviously, but it's at this point in our pre launch that we're going to go ahead and paste in the analytics code into this element. And it works quite well.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna go and turn on Yoast and run the Yoast wizard. Make sure all that stuff or your SEO plugin of choice. Make sure in Yoast, this is a big deal. Make sure in Yoast\r\n\r\na couple of things well first of all, a couple things I am\r\n\r\nI have too many windows open and I need to turn off my dashboard because I want to show you this am metal boxes\r\n\r\nOkay, so probably you've noticed if you're a Yoast user, how it's dropping in this winter integration and stuff, okay. So some of this is going to be settings that you'll want in your base site. But here under Yoast, we're going to go down to integrations. This is not in the checklist. This is a base site setting to turn off sem rush and winter. That gets rid of those stupid meta boxes.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nBilly, would it not be better to run Yoast after migration? No, doesn't matter.\r\n\r\nI want all this stuff set before I want I pushed the site over in the primary reason here. Let's look in search appearance.\r\n\r\nSettings. Oh, you know what? They didn't update. This is okay. This should be setting sorry. Oh, they updated this whole interface. So really here under Content Types, categories. I want to make sure that like Kadence elements. I don't want that showing in the sitemap. No Kadence elements should show up on its own right to turn that off. This is probably a setting for your base site because you're not ever going to want people to find your elements in the sitemap and so just go through each of these content types and make sure do you want put like if you have custom post types, maybe you want those to show up? Maybe you don't just make sure everything's set up correctly. Same down here for all your taxonomies on the site, like product categories I probably want but do I want WooCommerce Shipping Classes showing up in my sitemap Nope.\r\n\r\nTags? Yeah, probably. So.\r\n\r\nYeah. So go through those settings and make sure that only what you want to show up on the on the sitemap is what is actually showing up at this point, I'm also going to make sure that my default Facebook Share is correct. And I bet these links are wrong as well.\r\n\r\nI've neglected to update this for the new Yoast UI.\r\n\r\nLet's see where did they put that maybe a nurse settings danced\r\n\r\nAlright, does anybody remember offhand where they moved that? I don't spend a bunch of time looking.\r\n\r\nLike it's this\r\n\r\nis also I could turn author archives off for most sites.\r\n\r\nJust a good thing.\r\n\r\nMedia pages Oh, oh god it.\r\n\r\nI can't remember. There's a setting in here where you can pick your Facebook default. Share. And I can't remember where that is. But it is there somewhere.\r\n\r\nMake sure your crack image shares so once you this is a great tool if you're not aware of this, the Facebook debugger link it is in your guide. And we can\r\n\r\nthis actually goes out and scrapes the open graph data. And it shows what how this is actually going to look on the web. So go through and make sure that the key pages of the site look good when they're shared. Maybe a couple of posts, just verify. Also I'm going to use an external website like broken link check. I know this design of the site looks like it's gonna party like it's 1999 but that's okay.\r\n\r\nThe broken link check I know that there's WordPress plugins that do this. I would rather something from outside of WordPress scan through WordPress and let me know what's going on. So the if you Nathan duck um we got to type in our squiggly code\r\n\r\nand I want to report all occurrences in that see I hate squiggly codes in x\r\n\r\nokay, so it takes a minute but it's actually now crawling through the site. I would rather have an external report of a broken link like this. Just to verify make sure there's no broken links in the site before you launch.\r\n\r\nAlright, while this is doing its thing, we move on to the management section. At this point, I'm going to set up postmark for the new domain. And we have a whole separate process for that. I'm going to add my domain details to wherever you're tracking that stuff in your world. Who's the registrar what the DNS where it's hosted.\r\n\r\nAnd all that and then add the client to whatever email marketing software you use that you can reach out to all your clients and clay in case there's an issue. MailChimp list for us. We'll just drop them on that list. Hey, no broken links so that is good.\r\n\r\nAlright, so we're down to our cleanup phase. So I'm gonna make sure to switch to my editor user and make sure everything looks good with menu items, hidden and meta boxes and all of that. I'm gonna go through and remove all unused themes and plugins. So if I had any leftover development plugins like that WP multi page creator plugin that we use to create all the pages, make sure those are deactivated and removed at this point. I'm also going to check my number of revisions. Make sure those are set right. Gravity Forms. Oh, this is a this is a big one.\r\n\r\nGravity Forms as you probably know, tracks annual analytics, very simple analytics on its forms. Like Oh, this one's been viewed one time. Well during development that's probably picked up some things. So what I'll do is all the boxes, reset views, apply them also, if I've done any test entries. To test the form, you can permanently delete entries for those forms. I'll just go through and clear all that out prior to launch. Right now. I'm also going to delete the private site plugin that keeps our that kept our site private. I'm going to go through this is something I've added recently just it makes the world better. I'm gonna go through and do the backup solid backups diagnostic tools here and force cancel and daily housekeeping.\r\n\r\nJust to clean everything up.\r\n\r\nDiagnostics page does take a minute to load as it's looking at lots of different things. Here it goes. So we go to troubleshooting. And at this point, I would run force cancel just in case there happens to be a backup running right now. Let's just stop that and then we're going to clean up so both of those things. This takes about 15 seconds ish\r\n\r\nJeopardy theme, insert Jeopardy theme\r\n\r\nOkay, and then clean up all the old data just like that. That just wipes everything clean, you're ready to go.\r\n\r\nBecause next step is to go through and create the full backup for migration. So still doing they're gonna spoon clean out all the garbage. Alright, so we're totally clean, ready to go. We create our full backup. It's a relaunch. Do not forget to do this. If you're relaunching a site, if you're able to go in and back up the current site, save it in archive.\r\n\r\nDo it. I have original sites from four or five years ago in our Dropbox archive, I just want him there for just you never know. You never know when you might need something there. So go ahead and backup that existing site if you're able sometimes you don't have that access, etc. But yeah.\r\n\r\nAnd before you migrate the site go to that old horrible, terrible site that you just rebuilt with a brand new beautiful site and go take screenshots of all the pages of the old ugly site or the primary pages. So that later when you get time to do this, I know how it goes. You can create a before and after on your website, maybe a case study but if you don't have the before pictures, you won't be able to do that. So at least just go take the pictures and at some point hopefully you'll get around to doing that. But and you can show the before and after it's a good thing.\r\n\r\nAll right. So at this point we are done with our pre launch list. That's a lot. It does take some time. pausing briefly. Any questions about this? I feed it yes, there's always the wayback, machine@archive.org but a lot of times the images aren't available for you.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, in many cases, the images aren't available. So it's way better just to do this.\r\n\r\nAt you know, and there's Chrome extensions to do full screen captures and all that. So yeah. All right. No more questions. Then let's up somebody dropped in the q&a. Gene, do you request a testimonial? You can and I used to put that on my launch checklist, but I never did it at launch. So I took it off of there. So maybe on your checklist, it would be scheduled appointment three days from now to get a testimonial from the client because usually at this point, I'm just trying to get the site out the door right.\r\n\r\nOr it could be in an email sequence you send to the client after the payments received and whatever. It could be in the onboarding email, you send them a hey, now we're moving you in our support. And here's how you request support. And by the way, give us a testimonial. Here's a Google link or whatever. Yeah. Sherry, do you ever go back into archive Site Backups and reactivate them for a portfolio?\r\n\r\nYeah, so I backup a site? Because who knows? If something like maybe there was a form entry there that they never got and they need it and whatever. Just backup the site. It's you know, just back it up for screenshots. I take the screenshots right here before launch.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie, moving down the list, solid backups. So we're going to run through the solid backups migration process, import, buddy restore, boom done.\r\n\r\nAnd somebody mentioned earlier about that the checkbox that people forget.\r\n\r\nSettings and reading.\r\n\r\nsearch engine visibility, this one right here. The one that's like the most hidden? It is, it is the WordPress site that is the most hidden and most important all at the same time.\r\n\r\nYeah, if you check that box is checked, Google's not going to it's not going to index your site. Because that check mark says no index at the top of every page but at the end of the solid backups migration process, there's the spot where it says uncheck the hide from search engines box. So you can do this as part it doesn't have to be a separate step. In other words, just do this as part of the migration.\r\n\r\nAlright, so immediately, immediately after the site migrates, go clear all of the caches, because who knows, like things get messed up weird things happen with migrations and caches. So clear the Page Builder clack, the Page Builder cache, if your whatever website optimizing tool you're running for us, it's Lightspeed through the Lightspeed cache. Also go out there clear the Cloudflare cache.\r\n\r\nLightspeed fortunately has a Cloudflare API integration, where it clears it all at once, but just make sure whatever however many layers of caching you have happening, clear all of them and it's a good practice just to go ahead and refresh your permalinks.\r\n\r\nBecause sometimes, and maybe you've seen this and I've never been able to figure out exactly why this happens. But sometimes, when you restore a site, you go to in the home page loads just fine. But you go to any of the other sites and you get a page not found, and that's a permalink issue. So go in there, right as you launch clear, the caches reset permalinks and by reset permalinks I mean, go settings. Permalinks. Switch this quickly to plain save it.\r\n\r\nThen go back to post name and save it and you're done. That refreshes your permalinks takes like 10 seconds and you're done. This is a step. Oh my goodness. Don't Don't forget this step. Okay. Make sure that all of the ways people might access your domain have been tested. So both the HTTPS version and the HTTP version of with www and without www check manually, all four of those things in an incognito browser. Because that's going to real quick let you know up there's something going on here where it's not redirecting to HTTPS or it's not working right with the www or vice versa or whatever. So check them all to reveal any issues that have popped up.\r\n\r\nUsually, these are DNS issues that are causing that. Okay, that's the launch checklist.\r\n\r\nOkay, next up is once we're done the post launch checklist. So we're gonna go right in immediately reactivate solid security, make sure that SSL is forced on the front and the back end. And then we're gonna go into file permissions. And make sure and again, this is a cpanel environment. It's probably similar in most others, unless you're in the nginx environment. Make sure your htaccess and your WP config are set to 444. Now the way you test that you go to I'm not gonna be able to get there because I'm just going to run real quick through this wizard. Which is not my favorite\r\n\r\nby the way, I am I have talked to Timothy recently about having a skip this. Put into the wizard for the or expert mode for those of us that know what we're doing\r\n\r\nbecause this step, there's a nice little visual inside of solid security that shows this to you.\r\n\r\nOkay, um, settings.\r\n\r\nAll right, so I want it is under maintenance, no permissions\r\n\r\nPROTECT system files\r\n\r\nnope, that's not it. Let's see.\r\n\r\nWell, where did it go?\r\n\r\nI wonder if this got removed?\r\n\r\nYes, recent.\r\n\r\nPerhaps it did.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're not testing for that installed security anymore. It's still a good practice to go in and change your permissions to 444 that means no access. Even at that point, if a hacker gets in and gets writing access, as the WordPress user somehow they won't be able to change your IP config and your htaccess. So this is just a good practice. At this point, we're going to go through and relicense all of our themes and plugins that require it that have domain based licensing so we'll go through edit the checklist, add any plugins that you have that have domain based licenses, many do not. They just want the key, some do and you'll have to put those in at this point.\r\n\r\nSEO we're going to test the SEO sitemap. So it's always your domain slash sitemap underscore index dot HTML\r\n\r\nindex dot XML. So there's our yo sitemap just take a look at that. Make sure that you know it looks right. Everything is there's nothing showing up that shouldn't be that everything that should show up is showing up. If for some reason this 404 is it's because you forgot to reset permalinks earlier. I've had that happen. Now we're going to take this URL while it's up. At this point, we go over to Google Search Console, set up the property and validate it add the link to the sitemap in there. We're also going to add our site add to create a property in Bing Webmaster Tools, which will connect to Google Webmaster Tools, by the way, or Google Search Console.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll import this new site you just created in Google Search Console. Which is super cool. You can add the add the sitemap there as well. We're also going to activate the index now plugin, which will preemptively let Bing and other index now aware search engines know when you have added new content. Google doesn't support this yet.\r\n\r\nAt this point, we're gonna go back through our plugin list one more time, just make sure there are no unneeded plugins or themes and delete anything that's there.\r\n\r\nNow we're going to set it up in our management system, add it to solid Central, and set up reporting as needed. We're going to go in and tweak our solid backup settings. Now, you may remember in the Starter Site course what I recommended. We didn't set them up here. So I recommended setting up three backup schedules in your base site to our dev backups. There's there would well let's just do it.\r\n\r\nWe'll say this is our daily development full twice a day backup daily and that's unable to run. We've got that schedule set up we'll also in dev have a database backup once an hour. I can't tell you how many times this has saved my backside because you can just roll right back.\r\n\r\nOh, what does happen?\r\n\r\ndatabanks only once hourly. Oh, interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, and then I'll also add in the back this should be in the base site. We're going to add our daily backup. This is what it's going to be on the live site.\r\n\r\nBut I don't want this one enabled. So this is how it should look in your base site with\r\n\r\nso weird I wonder why that just happened.\r\n\r\nIt's the current time that is so interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we have our two enabled development backups and our disable but it's already set up and I would also have this already connected to the remote destination, if we're using it. So it's just all set up and ready to go. Now at this point of the launch process, we can go through here and delete these two because we don't need our dev backups anymore. And we then turn on our regular daily backup.\r\n\r\nSo we don't have to create it. It's already there in the base site. We get rid of our dev backups, we turn on our standard management type backup, and we're going to just double check our remote destination and make sure that everything's set especially the destination folder where it's going. Double check our settings just to make sure everything's right. Go ahead and create a full backup of the site now, send it over to the remote destination, verify that it appears and then I also download that thought that backup file and then save that in the archive. So most of our client sites since we've been running this launch checklist, there's a domain in the remote destination. There's like a launched or an old it's usually called Old and then the date. That was the original site. If we replaced it and that backups in there. Then there's a launched and then the date. And that's the this first backup after we launch I pull up into that launch folder that way I've got the site the way it was when we launched it. That makes sense.\r\n\r\nSo run through one final speed optimization just see if there's anything weird that's going on here and tweak anything that you might need to just one more final once over with the speed optimizations. And then our final task, go ahead and now that it's running and everything's right over on our live server, we can go clean up the development server, whatever's over there, delete the subdomain, the back the databases and so forth. We can delete if you if you built locally, you can delete all that if you want. Or you can just wait a few days if you want to. But you had the backups that's the thing. Pretty safe to go and delete things. When a post launch call with the client go and get that on the schedule and then take screenshots of your new website. So that is a pretty comprehensive launch process that I would encourage you to take and make your own. Put your own details into it and run it several times and see how it works for you.\r\n\r\nAll right, we actually finished a little bit early today. I got plenty of time for questions.\r\n\r\nWho has questions or comments about this or anything we've talked about during this optimizing your starter site.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, this is a good list. It's taken years to refine this. And it's likely that you'll refine it some more on your own.\r\n\r\nBut hopefully this saves you a little time\r\n\r\nYeah, so we talked about a little bit earlier. Sherry getting testimonials. So I would maybe have a I wouldn't put it that part of my website launch checklist. Maybe I would probably have something else, you know, follow up actions.\r\n\r\nIn my thought, I want to run this checklist and be done with it on launch day. Right so at the most I would look at the most I have this item down here when a post launch call with the client.\r\n\r\nRight? But like this is a list that when the site's launched on launch day, I want this done. I want all the boxes checked. Done. I don't want anything hanging around like for me to get a testimonial that depends on the client and he knows when they're ever going to respond to that and so forth.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nOther questions or comments about this that yeah, Debra? Thank you. That's great.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, we still have 20 minutes.\r\n\r\nI guess we can all get some work done.\r\n\r\nAnyway, this is it. Last Chance, of course. I mean, it's office hours tomorrow. So as always, you can come on and ask whatever you want about any of this. And that might be the case as you take some of this and start looking through it. You may discover that you have some additional questions. And of course, that's what office hours are for every Thursday. And that, by the way is not changing into the new year. We'll continue on our current schedule for office hours, which is most Thursdays. We will be on Thursday throughout by the way, the holidays. So this third tomorrow, the 21st and then the 28th. We'll also have office hours as usual. One thing I will mention, let's just pull up the calendar\r\n\r\nAll right, so we're a little skinny in January. I'm still working on some of that.\r\n\r\nWe will have no let me go back to December. No live streams.\r\n\r\nThe week of Christmas here so no live streams here and no live streams here either. So that's just kind of been our habit as we get through the holidays. We won't have live streams other than office hours.\r\n\r\nBut we do have several things scheduled for January. I'm still honestly I'm working on a premium event for January and I can't decide what that is. And I will actually appreciate some input on that during tomorrow's office hours.\r\n\r\nOh Jean that the settings are in tool.\r\n\r\nI knew they were there somewhere.\r\n\r\nAnd then I just seen them. Right here. Check file permissions. Look at that. Thank you Jean.\r\n\r\nRight. Okay, so this will tell you what the current value of permissions are and what they should be. So my root directory is at 755 in order to be at 750 and then these two are also wrong and you can change these by going into File Manager.\r\n\r\nActually, if we\r\n\r\nlet's just do the P config. That P config ought to be 444.\r\n\r\nSo here we are in our development site. We just do right and file permissions and make it for what's\r\n\r\nor, or just like that.\r\n\r\nAnd change permissions and you can actually see it right here.\r\n\r\nAnd if we run this again though, P config should turn green.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nThat lets you see\r\n\r\ncam How does iThemes Training different from solid Academy? Ah, it's this it's renamed.\r\n\r\nWe are Kim you're only chatting with me versus everyone if you want everybody to see your question. So Solid Academy is rebranded I iThemes Training.\r\n\r\nIt is virtually the same.\r\n\r\nhammy why don't we get API keys for Kadence? I have no idea. They, if you well, because it's a different licensing system for each of those. So Kadence has its own licensing system where you buy and they give you API keys, but you bought on the I think side and so you have to use your I think membership. It's just they're two separate systems.\r\n\r\nYeah, okay. Yeah. See, I'll take a look. We'll look at that tomorrow. You're having some issues with Kadence licensing. I don't know how much help I'm going to be but we'll certainly take a look at it.\r\n\r\nBilly, what has changed\r\n\r\nOh class have you did you get Kadence licensed license keys for Kadence No, that's always been that way Billy.\r\n\r\nYeah, it's always been toolkit members. Log in with unless I could be misunderstanding you Billy. But it's always been right here where you can license it you click here and then you log in with your themes username and password\r\n\r\nBilly you're saying you log in with I think security log it What's your I thought it was it would be your I iThemes login, which would also be used for I think security.\r\n\r\nBest you can email me at Nathan at solid wp.com\r\n\r\nOh, and by the way we do there is a survey that I created that I would really let me give you that link because I know there's some folks here that I don't believe completed that survey. Just about ideas for premium events in 2024. Here is that survey if you would just if you have not done this survey yet. I would really appreciate it it won't take you long. Like literally here's just a list in bath you can use this to this might even be easier to send.\r\n\r\nKeep everything in one spot. I've done a bunch of potential topics here. At this link. I just dropped in the chat and there's also a box here for you to type in ideas. But yeah, check all the ones you're interested in, check all of them that you're interested in. And I'm using this kind of a way out what we're going to spend time on next year.\r\n\r\nOkay, so class is saying solid support will get you license keys for Kadence pro if your legacy right.\r\n\r\nApparently class has done that. Go talk to support a betcha they'll work it out for you.\r\n\r\nYeah, yes. So Stacy if you fill it out already, and you have an idea.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely just drop it in here. I have like some analytics going on with these where it's tracking how many people voted so don't revote for these checkboxes. But if you have an idea, just type it in here and submit please that I would really appreciate that\r\n\r\nall right. Anybody else before we wrap up?\r\n\r\nYeah, so class has gone through the process of getting API keys. I didn't know how that worked. That's one of the kinds of things that I'm not in the loop on as a contractor a lot of those internal things I just don't know. So that's good. And that might be actually advantageous. To you. If you are a legacy toolkit holder, to go ahead and have the API keys.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie.\r\n\r\nWell, I believe that's going to wrap it up for us today. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last couple of days hopefully you've got some fun checklists to make your life easier. That's the goal of the Starter Site in general is just to make everything easier and more streamlined and more efficient and all those things. Alright, I'll see you back here tomorrow for office hours. 1pm Central here on solid Academy, where we go further together.","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:951:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:7:\"Day One\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:232:\"\r\n\r\n\r\nHour One:Starter Site Spin-UpProcess\r\nHour Two:Speed Optimizations and Dealing with Web Core Vitals\r\n\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"896340402\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QPYiWyzhrWyuykljt2cY8y5bN9vox5rE\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1Nu9hmLUXl31yrzDMI2SIbrXxnzVu33PJ\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/I2QPeCEk42SJNLuhX0jC4KWiyR4?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:819:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:7:\"Day Two\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:100:\"Hour One: Preparing a Site for the Client\r\nHour Two:Website Launch Process\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"896689056\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QPYiWyzhrWyuykljt2cY8y5bN9vox5rE\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1mtXDluaO1-VPbjYl0urojCYRwtFZmOsm\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/NBWaWDkTsA2iEueo_3fj86KxhXc?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448454,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nLast month, we focused on creating a starter site that you can replicate and use as a starting point for all future website development. This helpful tool allows you to eliminate the repeated work you do each time you build a website for a client.\n\n\n\nThis month, we will surround our starter site with processes and checklists to significantly improve the way we implement it for future projects.\n\n\n\nDay One Agenda: Starter Site Spin-up Process, Speed Optimizations (Dealing with Web Core Vitals)Day Two Agenda: Preparing a Site for the Client, Website Launch Process\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"All right course handbook is there in the chat if you're just joining us in zoom, open that up say howdy.\r\n\r\nElsewhere you're logging in from today.\r\n\r\ncaptions should be up and going for everybody now\r\n\r\nmany things in the course handbook\r\n\r\nYeah, Christine, make sure you you have disconnected that old things calendar it's not going to help you anymore\r\n\r\nAll right. It's optimizing your starter site.\r\n\r\nI have lost\r\n\r\nmy camera.\r\n\r\nHere it is.\r\n\r\nSo, good news, at least for me is I have now figured out how to turn off the gesture control on my camera so no cheap humor now for anybody.\r\n\r\nIt's sue me.\r\n\r\nAm I too loud for you sue. Sorry about that. Or too low\r\n\r\nAll right. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. I'm going to drop in the link bundle for today. I'm louder than most other webinars while they need to speak up. Good grief.\r\n\r\nOh, did I not do the right.\r\n\r\nOh, you're right. Look at that. Okay, I'm going to fix that really quick. I wonder why it says that.\r\n\r\nLet's fix that. It sure does. Interesting.\r\n\r\nWell, clearly, I made a typo. I know that's hard for any of you to believe.\r\n\r\nAlright, I've now updated.\r\n\r\nYeah, the title of the name there. Hopefully it'll get updated reasonably quickly.\r\n\r\nOh, that's weird.\r\n\r\nOkay, not updated. Okay. It's fixed.\r\n\r\nYeah, the link is correct. I think the file name on Google Drive was not correct. But I did just update that. I don't know how it could have gotten 2022 When I had 2023 in the PDF title. That's weird.\r\n\r\nvalid under 18 Weird things that have happened today. Hope you're all doing well. We're about a minute to go before we get started. You're just joining us in zoom links are in the chat.\r\n\r\nGood links are in the chat ready to go handbook and course replay. We got a long way to go over the next couple of days. It's gonna be a fun course. Yeah, can it's the internet ghosts. Yeah.\r\n\r\nThat's it. We're gonna go with that.\r\n\r\nMaybe it's time for me to wash my microphone windscreen here again.\r\n\r\nIt's the it's Mercury in Retrograde. I don't know what to think about all that.\r\n\r\nAh, yes. So yeah, I wish that Zoom had a way for me to pin like the links but alas.\r\n\r\nIt does not. So if you come on after I post things in the chat. It's not there. So I'll just keep posting things in the chat.\r\n\r\nOh, Stacy, that's nice of you.\r\n\r\nHopefully it'll be a good decision and worth your while. I think there's some good stuff here. Hey, Phoebe.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to go. Okay, I got three after so let us officially start this thing.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon, everybody. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to optimizing your starter site for 2023. This is our December premium event here on the solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host at solid Academy and also your instructor for this little course where we are taking the starter site that we built last month in the November 2023 premium course. And we're going to optimize it and surround it with some systems and processes and how do we use this and become efficient. So there we go. Let me take a quick poll unscientific, though it may be in the chat. How many of you have built your starter site after last month, or you tweaked your existing site?\r\n\r\nAnybody done that already?\r\n\r\nIt's a good time every year to rebuild a Starter Site.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right.\r\n\r\nA lot of folks have done that. 75% says Liz. Yeah, good. Okay. So this can still be helpful to you even if you did not see last month course, they are best taken together. But there's still a lot in here that could benefit you if you're using Kadence. First of all, and if you have a Starter Site, so let's talk about where we're headed over the next couple of days. Now again, if you're just joining us, the links are in the chat for this 29 Page course handbook as well as the replay, which will be up about an hour after we finished today. Maybe a bit longer today because it's things going on but it will be up soon before this evening for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we have a lot to talk about over the next couple of days. Our goals in this course, are to create consistent processes for preparing and launching websites. So last month, we talked about building the starter site that will be the base for all of our future development and we did things like getting all of our plugins install our plugin stack is there we've licensed as much as we can we've maybe created a basic contact forms, we never have to do that. Again. We have you know, set all the settings like we like them for the goal is to remove as much repetitive work as possible because it doesn't really help do that repetitive work. It just takes time. So the more that we can save and do it once and then replicate that for the future, the better. So we're going to take that base site that we found and we're going to surround it with consistent processes and process checklists that make it easier to deploy. So once you've got the thing, building the thing was last month, now we're going to work out ways to become even more efficient using the thing that we've built. We're also going to spend a little bit of time on speed optimization, as we usually do in this course because it's just helpful and it's an ongoing battle for speed and WordPress. So why is this course important? Our same three big ideas from last month efficiency, proficiency and confidence, efficiency by removing as many of these repetitive tasks as we possibly can, that should reduce the overall time that it takes us to deploy client projects. Also proficiency when we're using the same tool set and the same checklists and processes. Every time we build a client site. We get better at it. And so again, our time goes down and as we tweak our checklist we get better and better. And then that results in this soft result called Confidence. It's like it's not something you might expect. By building up these processes you might expect become more efficient. You could certainly expect to become more proficient. but confidence is one of these things that happens by the way, as long as you're doing these things. So as you systematize your systems and processes and you start getting better at the things that you do. It has this effect mentally of changing how you view yourself. This can actually be a great solution to impostor syndrome are one of the solutions because when you realize hey, I've got this thing and it works and I can build things and you know, I'm really good at this and I've got great processes and systems to build and deploy. It changes the way you think about yourself. It can change the way you think about your pricing. It has an overall great impact that you might not expect. So here's where we're headed over the next two days. Today, we're going to look at the spin up process for deploying this Starter Site for every client project that'll take up most of the first hour. Then we'll be looking at speed optimizations and Webcore vitals in the second hour today. Now tomorrow, we'll be preparing the site for the client and the things that go involved in that. And then we'll walk through a website launch process. So it'll take about four hours one hour for each of these topics. And of course we'll have time for questions along the way. You can use use the chat for that or actually, let me yeah, you can use the chat for that. I don't think we're going to be rushed for time. So you can use q&a If you want, but just drop it in the chat. I'll try to get those questions in context as we're going. I think we can make that work.\r\n\r\nAll right. So everybody excited everybody ready to go.\r\n\r\nWe've got our Starter Site, and now we're going to deploy it for each client project. Okay, so there's a series of steps that I've given you below in a logical order and by logical i mean it makes sense to me so it might not make sense to you. But you know, follow my thought process and make this your own. This is the way I do it. And, you know, I think it's a good start at least for making it the way you want to do it. It assumes that you have a basic design in mind with colors and logo and other assets. It assumes you have a basic content structure in mind. So just just way the actual spin up of the development site in our world, in my agency world usually doesn't happen until the development stage, depending if we're doing our design mock up actually in browser, it might occur prior to right as we're starting design phase. It depends on how we're getting design approval from the client. But the very first step in our process in my agency is content content first. So we're thinking about content architecture, and content definition, what needs to be on the site, what needs to be created, what's already there, what the media looks like, and getting all of that in place. So we're assuming as we move into this checklist that that stuff is already done.\r\n\r\nAnd again, these are suggestions based on my workflow, you'll want to modify it to you know, to match your process and your needs. And of course, I'm not saying by any stretch that this process is perfect. It works pretty well for me, but I still we still in the agency, we are iterating on processes. We're tweaking and changing checklist moving things around. Every now and then because we find a better way to do things. So processes and checklists are living documents that grow and expand with you as your knowledge expands. So you'll want to modify this as you find more efficient ways of deploying your starter site. Also, just be aware in these processes. Still, we're still finding things that we're adding to our base site. So if through the process of deploying a Starter Site, you realize I'm doing this every time. Well, why not just put that in your starter site to begin with? So for example, one of the things that we often do in the mobile menu of virtually every single site that we build, there's two things in the mobile menu that are not well three things that are always there, obviously, the menu items that's kind of a given, but we like to put the client logo above the menu and whatever the primary call to action button for the site is below the menu. So it's logo site, you know, menu items, and then the call to action button. So for whatever reason, I had never put those in the Starter Site, but I've changed that now. So in the Starter Site, there's going to be the we're actually going to rebuild our Starter Site. Next few weeks probably, there'll be the logo at the top, the menu and the call to action because I'm adding that to every site now on the current Starter Site. So as you discover these things that you're doing every time just take an extra minute and stick that in your starter site. You don't have to worry about it again. Right.\r\n\r\nOkay, does that make sense? Everybody with me so far? None of this is perfect. It's a jumping off place, make it your own and then continually improve it.\r\n\r\nBetter. Ben is asking is it a good idea to place the Starter Site on a domain classed as Dev? As some plugins do not require a you certainly could. It depends on where you like to develop. We do have a dot dev domain that we use for Yes, site development, and we spin things off in subdomains as we're building. Yeah.\r\n\r\nSo some plugins are aware of a dot dev domain and don't worry about the licensing. We just don't usually worry about that. We'll build with whatever current version we're on and good to go.\r\n\r\nMatt, actually, I can't think of any plugins we use in the base stack that are that are dot dev domain aware, but surely you could not dev domains are fairly cheap.\r\n\r\nAll right. So let's get into this process.\r\n\r\nWe're going to start off by duplicating our Starter Site. Now, wherever that lives for you, is how you're going to duplicate it right. So a great way to do this is with solid backups. You can simply backup and migrate from your starter site to a new in our world Billy's asking is it a subdomain or a new domain? So we have a, a, our base site lives in a subdomain and we replicate it to a new subdomain.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, and there's a bunch of other tools, right, but we like solid backups. It's great. We use it for everything. So set up your build environment, subdomain localhost, whatever, and then create a database and user restore your backup over there relicense themes and plugins as needed that require it for that new domain. If you are in a cpanel environment, the WordPress toolkit if you've not seen that before, WordPress toolkit is super cool. And you can actually just with a click clone the site there at the cPanel level, it creates a database that does all those things automatically, and it's done in like a minute or two. So it saves a lot of process, a lot of steps. And we're using that for a lot of sites now. Pretty cool.\r\n\r\nOkay, so once we get started I'm gonna we're gonna dive back into our actual Starter Site that we started last month here. Once you get the new site up and going, everything's working, we're gonna move into our Kadence options. This is where I start. Now again, this is my workflow that I've sort of figured out is the best way for me if you want to move things around great, but there's usually a reason that everything I have here is in the order that it is. So we're going to first start with our Kadence options. And if you're using a different theme, substitute your theme options here. So we're gonna go to appearance and Kadence and there's all these things we can toggle on. So I usually toggle on header add ons, Header, Footer Scripts, and hooked elements. And again, these are things it's here because it's in the Starter Site, right.\r\n\r\nAnd if that's what you usually toggle on, put that in your starter site so you don't have to worry about this. Are there any other elements here? Like do I is this site going to have an ultimate menu, maybe toggle it on right? So anyway, do all your settings in your theme right here at this point?\r\n\r\nThen we're going to move forward and start to create our page structure and menus. So what I use for this and I gave you this plugin in the stack, it's not well let me let me activate it and I'll show you it's this WP create multiple posts and pages. There's a bunch of plugins that do this. I kind of liked this one the best. It works, and it lets you just make a list and it creates all those pages at once. It's faster than page add new page publish page, add new page publish speakers in that. However, this is not a plugin that I would leave active on the site, even after this point because it does some weird things like it goofs up the Media Library in ListView. Like I don't know why it does this, that this plugin that's doing this, it's just ridiculous. But anyway, at this point, you know, let's say this is an attorney's website. We're gonna want like practice areas and then bankruptcy law\r\n\r\ndivorce\r\n\r\nI can spell Business Law cetera we're gonna want a the primary call to action page will be schedule a consultation.\r\n\r\nAnyway, just list out all the pages that you're going to want to create on the site one after the other, change our post type to page, we want it to be status published with post author Nathan. So this doesn't create child relationships.\r\n\r\nSo you'll do that in just a minute. So we're going to just add these posts for example. Now we go over here to pages, and we can say that\r\n\r\nthat's here. Get rid of that. So bankruptcy law, business law, divorce are both your bulk edit and make those under practice areas. So that's how I do this is create all the pages at once real quick and then go establishing the parent child relationships here with a quick edit, and that'll get all those setup.\r\n\r\nSo once we get our page structure set up, let's see we're not going to have services in this site. Do we have a contact page? Yes. About contacts, the practice areas news. Okay, that's pretty good schedule consultation. So now we're going to build out our menus. Now, I usually have\r\n\r\nas this I wish there was a way to like bulk remove pages that don't exist.\r\n\r\nAll right, so we've got our main menu here. So we'll want to drag these new things that we created over there. Let's see about it's really just going to be that the practice areas. We'll pull this over. Because this menu we set up as part of our base site. So create the menu based on what the typical pages are on your site, so that there's as few things to remove and add later.\r\n\r\nSo now we've got this set up, we have our basic menu. I also in my base site, there's a mobile menu that I create\r\n\r\nthat is going to be\r\n\r\nwell, I'll I'll use a mobile menu if in a lot of cases, this depends on the site, a separate mobile menu, we're gonna go ahead and set it up here. I do like to put the home link on the mobile menu. Whereas on the main primary menu of the website, I don't put a home link.\r\n\r\nI think it just takes up space and people know to click the logo these days. It's up to you. I usually do not put a home menu but I'm also going in I would I have this in my base site. I'm also going to set up a like some footer menus as well.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Create new menu we'll call this footer menu.\r\n\r\nfooter menu one and that's going to be home. You all home news about contact.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAnd then determine you to I'll show you why in just a minute.\r\n\r\nThat that's going to be our schedule area our practice areas\r\n\r\nAlright, so now we have all our menu setup.\r\n\r\nYeah, see the chatter in the chat about moving home menu. I mean, you know, look at most websites that have been designed in the last five years and they do not have a home menu.\r\n\r\nIt's just it takes up space doesn't hurt anything but it just takes up space and it kind of makes it look old school.\r\n\r\nSo if the client insists on it, add it anyway. Okay, now we're gonna move into the customizer and go colors, buttons and typography. So let's see, customize.\r\n\r\nRemoving the home menu is especially important if you have a really long menu and it starts you know, at some point you start to run out of real estate for the length of that menu. And so home is absolutely the first thing to drop.\r\n\r\nOkay, so at this point we go in and we're going to customize our, our color palette. So going in here to colors and then you know dealing with button colors, fonts and typography and anything that you're going to do we assume at this point, again, the design has already worked out. So we've got font choices, we're gonna go drop all that stuff into the Kadence customizer. Now, I've also have included here just for your reference, this was also in last month's course, this cheat sheet to the Kadence color palette in the article about that so if you want that it's there. If you're using Beaver Builder, you may want to consider the central color palette plugin because you can actually set your palette there in in the central color palette, and you'll still have to set it in the Kadence customizing Customizer Settings but central color palette you can have it push that palette into Beaver Builder that's really helpful you can also by the way force a particular color palette into beaver into beaver builder with this code I just gave you the link to the Beaver Builder doc so if you're a beaver builder person take a look at that. It's kind of cool.\r\n\r\nAll right. I've also re added to this guy this was also in last month's guide, the bit my basic Kadence typography settings and it's just here so starting out with 18 pixel base font weight at 1.75 line height. That's that's the first step and whatever font you've chosen, take a look at it for body text and make sure that it's not too big or too small. The The X Factor in font sizing is the x height. So if you look at some different fonts, like Montserrat versus EB Garamond, you'll notice that the related like in Eb Garamond for example, the capital letters are this tall and the lower letters are this tall. In Montserrat the capitals are this tall and the lower lowercase letters are just a little bit smaller. That has the effect of making the font look bigger on the screen. So you'll just want to you may have to tweak this 18 pixel setting up or down depending on the font that you've chosen for the website. So just visually verify it looks good. Here's that chart I gave you last month of heading sizes at different settings. And again tweak this make it your own. I find the settings work pretty well. And always 1.25 for the line height headings and line height settings in headings. Don't you hate it when you go to a site and like the headings are spaced really far apart? It just makes things hard to read. Those ought to be tightened up a little bit.\r\n\r\nAll right. So once you have all the typography settings in we're going to jump in and customize our header and footer. I'm going to go ahead and deactivate this multiple page plug in, because I hate what it does to the Media Library.\r\n\r\nLet's see Christine can line height be determined in the chart too. It's there. Yeah. So it's right here I set the line height at 1.25 for all headings 1.75 for body text that keeps the body text separated and readable. And again, it all depends on the font but that's a good place to start.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we're gonna jump into the customizer and get into the Kadence Header Footer builder which I really really like new\r\n\r\ncustomize Okay, so at this point we are going to go into our header settings. And the easiest way to do that is just a click up here. And that opens up our Header Footer builder, which is super easy to use.\r\n\r\nJump in and get into the logo settings and get your logo set set your site icon the fav icon here as well. Just get all those things set up. And go ahead and make sure your menu looks good. It is your search looks good it is and then your call to action button is set up for shedule\r\n\r\nscheduled consultation. Okay, that's massive. So at this point, we would go in and probably tweak the button size a little bit. That looks pretty good. Go ahead and set our whatever the URL is going to be and so forth. That's looking pretty decent right there.\r\n\r\nNow at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and look at the tablet view as well. Look at that the logo for whatever reason isn't showing up.\r\n\r\nWe didn't we have a logo did I have a logo? The other side? No, I did not. Okay. So we need to let me just set a logo. I'll just use my agency logo.\r\n\r\nThat's pretty good. I find that 200 pixels is decent. I'm gonna go loops a little bit smaller here. And let's check this and see how it looks at different breakpoints. Yeah, I like that.\r\n\r\nAnd I like oops, it's a little bit too big here on mobile. So I'm gonna fix all of that right here, right now at this point. So I'm not going back into the header builder later. It's probably a little too much padding around this which we can adjust here. Just make sure that make sure that the phone item is selected\r\n\r\nand I've also noticed that doesn't update very well here.\r\n\r\nLive or whatever reason, but that should get us about where we want, which still too much space. Anyway, I'm not gonna spend time on that. Just get that this is something you'd likely do in your base site to get the spacing correct. In the mobile menu, you get the idea go and get it set up. At this point, we drop in a site icon now as well.\r\n\r\nYep. Okay.\r\n\r\nAnd again, be aware of changes you make. Add them to your base site if you find that you're doing the same thing over and over again. Now from here, we're going to go down to the footer of the site. Same difference, click on the Edit Edit button down here we have our copyright as the standard featuring Kadence footer. Over here I would set up you know you can set up like a multi column layout if you want and how many columns you want that to be you can drop things in here, I actually find it more useful to have a Kadence element as the footer of the site. And so you can do that in Kadence elements really easily by and I have this as part of our Starter Site. It's a Content section. Global flutter and just make loops\r\n\r\nmake a row of like three columns and set up your things there. When you go and set this up. You can say this is going to\r\n\r\nreplace the footer display on the entire site.\r\n\r\nYou can do any other settings you want but at this point, we are set\r\n\r\non there\r\n\r\nand so we wouldn't be at that point using the Kadence Header Footer builder anymore.\r\n\r\nOr the Kadence footer builder. I really do like using an element as the footer is I like a nicely designed footer with columns and things like that with our menus there. And it really works out nicely. So\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nAt this point also go in look at all your your mobile views for tablet and phone at this point. Make sure your footer is all set up correctly and how you want it.\r\n\r\nI've got a couple of different footer layouts in my starter site. One is a single has a single horizontal menu across the top with all the information and also there's a second footer there that has like multiple columns if you have silo menus in the footer, and so that's just present and already set up for both of those options in the Starter Site. And I'll delete the one that I'm not using at that point. I also have I've given you the CSS snippet, and I think this is really cool. I figured out the way that shouldn't happen.\r\n\r\nCan you help somebody click on that snippet. And make sure it's public.\r\n\r\nIt should be public.\r\n\r\nIt's public. Okay, well anyway, so I have\r\n\r\nthere's a way I discovered to link to the exact line in the gist. So that's kind of cool.\r\n\r\nAnyway, I thought that was nice. But I've given you this, this little bit of CSS here. And what this does, let me just show you a site we have in development right now.\r\n\r\nSo here is a site we're developing right now for an attorney. And what it does notice here how we have some silo menus. This is actually just the way we created this menu over here.\r\n\r\nMenus.\r\n\r\nOkay, where it's like the practice area at the top and in the sub items. That's how this is set up. And what that CSS does is keep them it doesn't indent the sub menus.\r\n\r\nBut it makes the the top one bold, and then it makes the other ones right below it. So it's it's just dropped that CSS in your wherever you're loading your your styles, that CSS or your global CSS, and it will sort everything correctly.\r\n\r\nAnd make it nice. So for these nice silo menus, like down here at the bottom here, that's pretty cool.\r\n\r\nThat makes sense everybody so we got our header set up we got our footer set up. We're going to view them and all breakpoints and we're done with that piece. We don't have to touch our headers and footers again. That make good everybody. Good. Where do we have a question?\r\n\r\nAll right, the next bit I'm gonna blaze through because it's pretty straightforward at this point in Kadence, or whatever theme that you're using, Go on in and start to customize your standard page layouts.\r\n\r\nSo in Kadence, that's page and post layout. We're going to go into page and just you know how are we going to do titles? Are they inside the content? Are they above the content? You know, how does that all look set up any backgrounds or whatever? You know, is our pages. Are they going to be naturally just normal? With margins? Are they going to be full width or you know, have her get all the standard page settings the default setting set now at this point.\r\n\r\nAnd you're good to go on pages from there. Also, we're going to do the same thing for the blog. So we want to first do our single post layout and we're going to do basically the exact same thing. That we kind of sample post. Yes.\r\n\r\nAlright, so here's our you know, just go through and set. How do you want your blog to look and again, in your starter site, we talked about this last month, but in your starter site, however you most like to make blogs, look, the majority of the time have those settings in your base site, so you don't have to go change this very much. Every time. But so we set up our pages now we're going to set up our single posts how they're going to look. Just do all our settings here for that. Now we're going to go to the blog archive page, and make sure that the basic blog archive page looks how we want it to look.\r\n\r\nSo basically, it's, you know, three posts across. I'm going to actually turn off the excerpt.\r\n\r\nThere's that you can maybe put a date on there if you want to do that.\r\n\r\nYou know, I get this set up. The way you like it. Maybe it's only two across, you can figure all that out. And on all of these, make sure that you view it on all breakpoints, just to make sure all the settings are correct.\r\n\r\nAgain, hopefully your typical settings and your base site are at 90% there and you just have to tweak small things at this point.\r\n\r\nAll right. Something else to look at is search results.\r\n\r\nSo let's search for something\r\n\r\nalright, so there's our search results page. How do we want this to look? So I'm gonna I'm gonna suggest that we do this with a Kadence element. And again, this is you'll want to have the element set up as part of your base site. We didn't have time to do that last month but we're going to call this element search results\r\n\r\nand you can choose how that's going to look we'll just gonna do a simple host list. Oh my, okay. I don't want to get into that.\r\n\r\nI don't want to\r\n\r\nposts that's what I wanted. Okay, and just make sure that we're using the\r\n\r\nthere is the default wearing\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nAlright, I've forgotten how we do this just a minute. Let me review that in myself. So\r\n\r\nyou can take a look at my base site.\r\n\r\nIt has been a little while.\r\n\r\nNot seen it. Okay. Well, all right. Can anybody remind me where we go to set this post loop as the default\r\n\r\nedit for the default query on the page\r\n\r\nthis one\r\n\r\nto left this one.\r\n\r\nIs it the K icon?\r\n\r\nI don't think so.\r\n\r\nNo, shoot. If I don't find it, right away and we got to move on. It's going to go on search results.\r\n\r\nHere we go.\r\n\r\nMaybe it'll just work.\r\n\r\nMaybe it will grab the the default query\r\n\r\nOh my okay.\r\n\r\nThis doesn't work quickly that I'm going to move on.\r\n\r\nWe're just kind of want one column so our search results look like this. We'll leave that make that however you want it to look. Let's just see if this works. I don't think it's going to work. But we'll try it.\r\n\r\nOh, you know what? You may be right.\r\n\r\nYou may be right. Maybe this is not a content element, Billy. Well, let's just see if it works. But I think you may be right Billy.\r\n\r\nNope, that didn't work. It's showing posts.\r\n\r\nBut oddly, it's showing three columns.\r\n\r\nLet's try this one more time. Yeah, I think you're right. It should be a template.\r\n\r\nWe'll start that over again.\r\n\r\nThat's why we didn't get the settings on that.\r\n\r\nHill stone for the win. Thank you.\r\n\r\nRight.\r\n\r\nTemplate placement\r\n\r\nthank you that's\r\n\r\nno\r\n\r\nokay, well, we made a mess. We'll have to look that up. So that's basically what you do.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nI think you're right, it should be a template that's going to drive me crazy.\r\n\r\nThat's still has to be set. I don't want to get bogged down here.\r\n\r\nHuh. Replace the content\r\n\r\nshould be loop item content that pulls the current loop into this on the search results. user shouldn't matter expires shouldn't matter. Explanation matter.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nI don't know why it's not working. So just do that. You'll be fine.\r\n\r\nWell, we'll solve this at a later date. Check back in office hours. Okay. So customize your search results page. Wasn't that easy?\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. Next is our custom 404 page. This is actually not a problem at all in Kadence. And so again, in your base site, go ahead and create have an element setup for your 404 page template or a four page right here it is placement on referral for content display on our not found page. And that's all we need there.\r\n\r\nAnd we can have a row and we can have put a search box in here and we can say blah blah blah over here\r\n\r\nupdate, okay.\r\n\r\nAnd so\r\n\r\nwhen we do a bla bla bla and get a four, four, we'll get our nice 404 page here. That's kind of cool to kind of have a template set up in your base site. And you can go in and tweak it for the client. Now this is this is a really neat thing to do. It's just an extra little step that you can give to your client because you know, make fluorophores keep them on brand. Let the 404 page speak with the brand's voice typography colors all that instead of just the basic not found that WordPress and WordPress gives you make them funny people get frustrated if they get a page not found so you know have something funny or engaging or interesting when it shows up. One neat thing you can do is go grab a lot of animation and use the Kadence Lotty block and drop in a lot of animation. So there's something moving around and looking neat when they hit a 404 page. You can even if you wanted to embed a game that and one of these embeddable WordPress games like the dinosaur game that Google used to embed in Chrome, make sure that you have helpful messages there links to popular site areas. Soft call to action, perhaps search box. Anyway, set up a basic 404 layout and then tweak it for every client as you're moving this forward. I've given you some really cool 404 Page examples.\r\n\r\nOh good.\r\n\r\nOkay, well look at our taco bell is Taco Bell down surely.\r\n\r\nTherefore, a four page which\r\n\r\nOh, interesting. I don't know what's going on there. Well, maybe all these are?\r\n\r\nSurely not.\r\n\r\nOkay, so like here's a Lego this isn't a perfect example of an on brand 404 page. Really cool.\r\n\r\nThis one's really neat. This is a developer's website.\r\n\r\nAnd this is how many of you remember the old lemmings game? I used to play this on that PC years ago. And it's actually you're trying to save the lemmings before they hit the crown. And get squashed.\r\n\r\nOh, and you can't hear this, but there's a really obnoxious squishing sound that's happening. Anyway.\r\n\r\nThis one's kind of neat. Anyway, you can take time and look at some of these examples just for some inspiration of 404 pages. But there's some pretty neat stuff here. Like here's a Space Invaders game play this actually works.\r\n\r\nCool.\r\n\r\nUm, let me that's pretty poor.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAnyway, you get the idea.\r\n\r\nThis is kind of neat.\r\n\r\nThis is also a game.\r\n\r\nYou can play.\r\n\r\nAnyhow, you get the idea. So just build out a nice four or four page for your clients.\r\n\r\nOkay, so set up your element just like that like we just did very easily. Okay, now this is a pet peeve of mine. And that is styling the Kadence full screen search. I am not a fan of this search experience. And unfortunately there's not a way in the customizer to really deal with this. I don't like the solid black. I don't like that it's 100% opaque. I do not like the box shadow on the search anybody with me on that?\r\n\r\nDon't like it Okay, so I've given you some CSS.\r\n\r\nAnd here is well, it's just the box shadow. But I had more here for you. It's easy enough to deal with. So here is some CSS which for simplicity, I'm going to put in the customizer\r\n\r\nand that will get rid of the box shadow.\r\n\r\nThat's much nicer. And then if you want you can just inspect this and grab the see where's my overlaps the search drawer right there and doing the Edit no\r\n\r\none is doing the color here\r\n\r\nright there it is. Search drawer and drawer enter. Actually let's let's grab this\r\n\r\nand we can make that background something like point nine that'll be significantly\r\n\r\nless opaque.\r\n\r\nIt's a little less opaque or you can change it to by the way, have you guys seen how to use the CSS variables. So down here you may have noticed in the CSS Inspector there's all these variables that are set. In some of these we get down to a spot or the Kadence variables like right here. There's our global pallet position. 1234 Did you know you can copy this and use that in CSS. So here we can say our global palette one and that's going to now be our background.\r\n\r\nSo when we refresh, it should be that blue. See there so you can pull any of these global palette items.\r\n\r\nAnd if you're using if you're in a beaver builder situation and you're using central color palette, it has a way to assign global variables like that as well. And you can pull those just the same way. So it's just bar is going to make this bigger make this where you can read it better\r\n\r\nto do\r\n\r\nso if you can use this in place of any standard like if you're gonna use hash, you know hex name for the color, it's just bar open parenthesis name and the variable closed parenthesis and the neat thing is watch this when we go and change. If we go change this in our Customizer Settings come on colors. Alright, so this is global one right there. If we change that to you know, pink, fuchsia.\r\n\r\nNow, it automatically updates because it's a variable.\r\n\r\nSo the background is that way. Kind of neat, right? This by the way is how when you change your palette and Kadence all the colors update because it's using CSS variables.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo that reaches the end of the first part. And I'm actually about two minutes ahead of time. So we'll pause just for a minute questions, comments, snide remarks about the spin up process. So at this point, you've got our headers built footers built, search page, search page, completely finished? Yes. 404 Page, tweaked and customize all of that set. And, yeah, we're ready to start building individual pages. Let's see.\r\n\r\nStacy, what was the code? So it's just it's right here.\r\n\r\nInstead of doing you know background\r\n\r\ninstead of doing it like this with a hex code or an RGB or whatever, just do var that means a CSS variable var, open parenthesis the name and you get that again from just going into the inspector, scrolling all the way down. And you'll see these global variables here and just copy this bit here and use it and you'll find that that makes life so very much easier.\r\n\r\nAh, Stephanie does the additional CSS go in the child theme it totally so it's gonna go wherever you are going to put your CSS. So yeah, it's whatever. Yeah. So if you're putting if you have a styles dot css, where you're putting Child Theme CSS put it there. I put it in the customizer for convenience. I hate the customizer CSS.\r\n\r\nSomething we started doing actually is using a Kadence element where our global CSS that way it doesn't have to go load the styles that CSS from the child theme. You can do it a lot of different ways.\r\n\r\nBut just the I guess, let me add this. Whatever you do, be consistent in your development processes.\r\n\r\nSo it goes so that you know where you're going to put it right so don't put sometimes in the child theme and sometimes somewhere else.\r\n\r\nSue is asking about that element. So the way we do this in there's a drawback to this, but I'll show you how it works. We're going to create a CSS we're going to call it global. It's going to be an HTML editor, global CSS. We're going to put that placement inside the head tag, and then it's just going to be a script tag with our CSS listed in here, so it's dropping in the header of the site. So it's all inline in the header\r\n\r\nso in that case, it would look something like this.\r\n\r\nRight\r\n\r\nso the downside with this as you lose autofill.\r\n\r\nSo the Kadence element code editor doesn't autofill CSS markup for you. So that's the downside.\r\n\r\nSo where you would add the site's CSS right here?\r\n\r\nJust as it was a script tag in the header of the site.\r\n\r\nYou're loading it as a tag just like you would anything else.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Can you change the inside of the search box asks VB well let's take a look.\r\n\r\nI see b Do you mean like make the the text box you typed in a different color?\r\n\r\nYeah, so like mate, let's make this a different. Okay, so what does that let's see what we've got here label input type equals, so this would be our our good option here. So we'll do search field. I'm just going to go back over here to CSS.\r\n\r\nAlright, so I'm going to further make I'm going to restrict this to search drawer search fields that's just going to be on this overlay page. Search field.\r\n\r\nBackground here actually, we see the background is set to transparent. Let's actually grab the whole CSS markup here.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll say let's make this RGB a\r\n\r\nso 90% white\r\n\r\nbut and we're also going to let hang on background\r\n\r\nand we'll want to make the text\r\n\r\ndark gray.\r\n\r\nSee if that works. I think it will\r\n\r\nknow Awesome.\r\n\r\nWell\r\n\r\nsee if that works\r\n\r\nyes so now we need to make it's gonna require an important which not sure why you may be able to research that and find something else that will make it not have to be important.\r\n\r\nTry not to do that. Yeah, there we go. That's not bad. I\r\n\r\nneed to change that color too.\r\n\r\nAll CSS All right, anybody else before we quit? We're right at time for break.\r\n\r\nWhy do we just stay in important Okay, so, it Sue it is best practice to use as few importance as possible. It's always better to restrict or to get specific on CSS by adding additional selectors to make it more and more specific until you target the right thing. Important is kind of case it's the use, use it as a last resort because it can often affect other things. Just best practice not to use important if you can avoid it.\r\n\r\nAnd there are many developer reasons for that, which honestly, I can't remember at this moment, that's there you go.\r\n\r\nOkay, all right. Let's take a 10 minute break. We're back at five minutes after so 10 minutes from now we're back. That'll be five minutes. After 2pm Central. We'll see you back then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute. From now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we're back for the final hour of day one talking about speed optimizations and web core vitals. So if you have listened to anything that I have been talking about over the last couple of years, you know that I have a love hate relationship with web core vitals and site speed. And now we're just gonna get right in the middle of all that now. All right, so let's talk about what are Webcore vitals and why do we need to care about them?\r\n\r\nSo Google, several years ago, introduced this concept of Webcor vitals to give preference in search engine results to sites that offer a better user experience. And so, web core vitals are like your website's vital signs, right? So it measures your site against four different areas of performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. So if your site scores high in the web core values, this might help it rise in the search results. Now, here's what I'm going to tell you. Speeding up WordPress is incredibly frustrating. Can anybody else relate to me with that? Do you not find speeding up WordPress is just about one of the most frustrating things that we do. It's just frustrating, right? So if you try to get serious about it, you're going to be frustrated. And if you're not, please tell me how. So I want to learn better, but I'm telling you, it's just gonna be frustrating, and here's why.\r\n\r\nModern beautiful websites have lots of stuff on the page. stuff on the page takes longer to load.\r\n\r\nModern beautiful websites have some interactivity and movement, interactivity and movement take a while to load.\r\n\r\nSo from the get go, they're going to be slower. To load then a very basic website. And we're not building basic websites, right. We're building beautiful modern websites for our clients, but they're engaging and users you know, like to stick around. Okay. Now, the other second reason that this whole work is frustrating is that there's lots of different testing tools available that often give wildly different results when you test a page. Like one will say you're awesome. The next one says you suck. And it's just crazy how these tools give such different results. And even this is even worse. If you test the same page in the same tool back to back, you often get different results. So it's like what am I supposed to do here?\r\n\r\nLike one time I test I get like a 95. The next time I test I get a 75 How is that even possible? Right? So it's frustrating and if you get frustrated, you're in great. You're in the you're in the club, right? We're all frustrated. There is no magic wand to speed up WordPress. There is no plugin that you can install. There is no blog post that you can read. There's no course that you can go to that's going to immediately solve this issue for you. It is hard, it is frustrating. And you know, that's just the way it is. I wish there was a difference. If you read or see anything that promises you quick and easy speed improvements. They are trying to sell you something and it's probably not going to work the way they say it is. That's just life. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo now that I've depressed everybody, let's talk about why this is difficult. speed optimization is hard work. If you're serious about optimizing your websites for speed. You're going to have to invest time to perfect your process. You're probably also going to have to invest money in premium tools to deal with things like on page optimization and image optimization and those sorts of things. There is a lot of trial and error involved sometimes a lot of error is involved in this. speed optimization tools are one of the things that can most readily break your WordPress websites, the wrong setting and all of a sudden, you don't notice it right away but up your form won't submit because you've optimized the JavaScript wrong or something like that's going on, or the CSS is all wonky. How many of you have had that happen? But you've said everything, it looks great, the site's fast, and you come back the next day, and the CSS is like, oh, everything's all goofed up. Oh, it's horrible. So, look, this is a fact of life and it's almost a rite of passage. If you're gonna try to do speeding up WordPress.\r\n\r\nSo while 80% of your settings might work from site to site, there's still likely you're going to need to dial in some settings on every site. It is.\r\n\r\nIt is frustrating.\r\n\r\nBut here's the thing. I want to tell you. speed optimization is not all there is now there are people and I know him I know they're out there. They're all over Facebook groups are talking about all we can make. Everything should be fast. If you're not getting the 99 on every 100 100 On every website on Webcor vitals you're doing it wrong. Bla bla bla, y'all. That is garbage. Hear me say it it is garbage. You're free to tweet you know Phil, feel free to quote tweet me on that. Speed. Listen, speed is one factor in Webcor vitals one of the four factors and Webcor vitals and Webcor vitals are only one signal in Google's overall algorithm. So they're one part of one part of the thing. All right, speed is not all there is. Believe me. Content is king. It's always been about content, it will always be about content. Articles on search engine. Blogs, like Search Engine Journal, have noted that Google has been emphasizing other ranking signals above web core vital So listen, is it worth spending hours of your time to notch up a site speed from a 92 to a 99? Please don't do that. Your time is better spent elsewhere. Write better content and your site will get ranked better. You know now, where speed comes into account is if you have a domain authority. That's roughly the same size as your competitor. If you have content that's roughly the same value as your competitor, then site speed might inch you out above them, but it's not you know, if your site doesn't have great backlinks if it doesn't have good domain authority, simply making the site faster is not going to jet it to the top of the ratings. That's garbage that's sold to you by people who are trying to sell you optimization services, or sell you some magic bullet plugin that's supposed to just fix everything and those things don't exist.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna step down off the soapbox now. Are y'all with me?\r\n\r\nOkay, hopefully I haven't offended everyone.\r\n\r\nHopefully. Okay, here we go.\r\n\r\nLet's talk about how we deal with site speed. Okay, number one, the number one thing to consider if you're trying let's let's let's approach it from this perspective. Do we all want to build sites that are pretty fast? Right that don't take five seconds to load?\r\n\r\nOf course we do. Right? Of course, we want to build quick website.\r\n\r\nSo there are some things that we need to think it's like this. Do you want to build accessible websites? Like do you want to audit and just like, build websites that you're you have, you don't just want to think about accessibility? No, of course not. There's some basic things you can do to make the site more accessible. You know, in the same way, there's some basic things you can do to make the site faster out of the gate. It starts with your design. Speed starts with the stuff on the page that's going to be loaded, okay. I don't care what magic plugin you have. I don't care if you have the fastest web host in the world run through eight different, you know, layers. of caching, and Cloudflare all that stuff. I don't care if the page is really long and has giant images and video and interactive elements. It is going to be slow.\r\n\r\nI mean, it's going to be slow. You might speed it up marginally by some other tactics. But speed starts with design the stuff that's actually on the page. So consider all of the elements that are on a page, every single thing, the text, the images, the asset, all the things on a page, like weight. Every one of these things adds weight. It's like you know, there's a scale and a little bucket and you're dropping in wait for every little thing that you're adding on that page, right? Text, relatively light, images, videos and interactive elements like anything that is interactive tabs and what do you do poorly do flippy cards and all that stuff that everybody likes to use? That's the technical term. By the way. All that stuff requires JavaScript has to load ads. Wait, wait, wait, wait and I'm stacking those things up. Right clients want beautiful pages, oh, put a video in my hero area and I want you know, all these interactive flippy things all the way down that well that's great, but it's going to make the page heavy. And there's nothing that an optimization plugin can do. That's going to fix that. It might marginally improve load time, but the page just weighs a lot. Bottom line. So you say to the client, I can do that. But it's going to make the page slow, and that's going to hurt you ultimately perhaps in your rankings. So could we do the same thing or, you know, accomplish the same end result with a lighter page weight? That's how we ought to be thinking about design. So key pages as simple as possible, while making them as engaging as possible. Get the fewest number or use the fewest numbers of images, blocks and modules. However, you're building that you can to get the impact that you need. In other words, ask yourself, Does this really need to be on the page? Does this really need to be a tabbed section? Or could it just be a series of headings that are maybe staggered back and forth for some design interest, right, employee animations and interactions sparingly?\r\n\r\ninteractions of any kind, like if a mouse mouse is over something, and something happens, any kind of interaction like that requires JavaScript. And so JavaScript has to load it just in it's going to make the page take longer, or it's going to add CSS if it's lots of different animations, those sorts of things. So use static elements and basic blocks or page builder modules, wherever possible. And so ask yourself Does the page really need that scrolling logo block or what just a couple of columns of images work that are static? That's the kind of decisions to make and that making sense. It's all like you got to make design decisions that are going to end up with a fast page.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. So design first, that's your first approach. Second is hosting. All right. Even the lightest design can be slowed down. If you're on shared hosting. I don't care who shared hosting it is shared hosting is shared hosting, and it's going to have fewer resources, even if that web host has their own handy dandy optimization plugin. It's still shared hosting, and it's going to be slower than quality hosting, and either a managed WordPress platform or a VPS or dedicated environment.\r\n\r\nInexpensive shared hosting does have a place, okay. That's great for personal sites or hobby sites or whatever, sites that aren't competing in the marketplace. So any site that's in competition for others for traffic ought to be hosted on professional hosting. And I'll have that conversation with clients sometimes and I'll explain you know, like last week, last Friday, we talked about, you know, different kinds of hosting and how to position that in terms of a care plan. And look, you know, I'll tell clients, you're using amateur level hosting on a professional level site, right like this. Is this is hobbyist hosting. It's not business class hosting, you got a real business, it needs real hosting. So start with design, build light pages, second, put it in a hosting environment that's going to deliver those things fast. And only then, do we worry about asset optimization. Now let me ask you a question. When you hear all these discussions about making WordPress faster, where do they always start?\r\n\r\nThey start with asset optimization. Oh, you got to get this plugin and you got to have these settings. Listen, start with design, then hosting and been at asset optimization you can optimize your assets all day long. But if the design is too big, or if the hosting is too slow, you're spinning out like you're wasting tons of time, it's not going to help. So apply strategies for fine tuning assets used by the website and there's different layers of this. image optimization is probably the very first thing I would look at, even before you get into all these plugins that tweak your JavaScript, all that stuff. image optimization is the biggest bang for your buck. So we want to come we want to convert images to web be most likely because they load quicker. We also want to make sure we are we've got some sort of something on the server, a WordPress plugin that compresses all of your images. I'm gonna talk more about that in just a minute. We also want to make sure that we have a good page and browser caching strategy, like good hosting that has a quality object cache page cache that eliminates the back and forth of going to the database. We also want to make sure finally that we're deferring CSS and JavaScript. And this is where it gets really complicated and breakable. And is the thing that's going to have the smallest aggregate impact across all your speed optimization efforts. So look, you can spend all your time tweaking all the individual CSS and JavaScript files you want. But if your images aren't optimized, if you're not using caching, if your hosting is terrible, and if your page is gigantic, it's not gonna matter. It's not gonna matter. So start at the top work your way down. Does that Okay? Am I Am I harping on something I don't need to be harping on?\r\n\r\nMaybe so, anyway.\r\n\r\nOkay. So lots of discussion starts and ends with acid optimization. Don't look, don't that's, that's important, but it's like way down the list. Get the other stuff right first. Okay. So let's talk about how we evaluate our sites for speed. So there's first of all, there's several tools available. Pingdom is a classic one, I don't use ping them at all anymore. It's not helpful to me. I would recommend not using GT metrics is a good tool however, they've moved the mobile test out of the free version. It is helpful in I do like the GT metrics waterfall view. It's it can help you see what you know, it's an easier way to see what's maybe causing a delay, but it only gives you the desktop view and quite frankly, that's cop is not the problem. In speed optimization, it's mobile. So that brings us down here to these two, which are essentially the same tool. First of all, Google's web dot Dev, it's at web dot dev slash measure. This gives you what Google sees. And that's really what matters because it's Google's web core vitals. It's free. You can see the mobile and desktop, it gives you all four of your scores in the web, core vitals categories, and you can click View Report under your URL and get a thorough look at all these things. So this is the place to go but for quick and immediate information, use lighthouse in Chrome, and I'm gonna guess that most of you have seen this already. But if you haven't, this is the place to start in Chrome. Go to the inspector. Click the lighthouse tab. And right here, we get all the web core vitals reports. I'm going to only do performance because I'm only at this point concerned about site speed, set it for mobile, and I can just run right here in the browser, my PageSpeed audit. So as you're tweaking and making changes, this is the way to do a get a quick reading on your site speed. I generally process is pretty quick 1015 seconds and you're done.\r\n\r\nAnd you'll get the Lightspeed score.\r\n\r\nOh my goodness, it's taken longer than normal. Alright, so no optimization out of the gate. We got to 83 on mobile. And so it does give you some additional information you can drill down into if you like, but use Lighthouse it's the simplest tool that's gonna help you see what's going on. Now, this is important. Best practice is to run in a guest browser. So you're not logged in and so that there are no browser extensions running. Okay, now I know some people say do to incognito, that's fine. But in your Google Chrome, sometimes your incognito mode can have browser extensions enabled. So what I do like here, go to guest This is the best way to do it. Totally clean Chrome. And let's go to this URL, and it should be faster because in our last test, we were actually logged in. When you're logged into WordPress, it loads a bunch of extra JavaScript and stuff.\r\n\r\nOh, man, it's locked down. So let's unlock it.\r\n\r\nWe've got that site privacy set up here with my private site.\r\n\r\nOnce turn that off.\r\n\r\nNow we should be able to get to the page. Oh, come on.\r\n\r\nWhy don't we get Chrome caching going on?\r\n\r\nMake sure cloud I think I turned on Cloudflare developer mode for this but I may have got to\r\n\r\njust really quickly\r\n\r\nGood grief\r\n\r\nokay\r\n\r\nokay, development don't get turned off. Alright, so let's bypass cache. That's probably what our issue is here.\r\n\r\nAnd let's go back to Oh, my goodness, come on.\r\n\r\nWell, anyway, how did I get the but the guest button. Yeah. So under your profile here.\r\n\r\nThere's a guest.\r\n\r\nLet's try this again. And you know what, maybe it may be cached. I'm just gonna go to a different browser now.\r\n\r\nOh, but I don't have a cat it's gotta be chrome\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go. Now if we run this test again, here, these are all on by default. Global.\r\n\r\nBetcha we're going to be significantly faster than we were.\r\n\r\nOver on this other one.\r\n\r\nWas it an 82? Yeah, see, it's 10 points higher just not being logged in. With no optimization. Anyway, that's why you do your guest browser.\r\n\r\nThank me later.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo lighthouse in Chrome. You can also go to Google PageSpeed Insights, which is PageSpeed dot web dev. This is it's really helpful for sites that have some degree of traffic, because it will tell you what other users are actually experiencing with PageSpeed. So it's not like a simulation. It actually shows from Chrome browser visitor data, how fast the website actually takes to load or how long it takes load out in the field. So that's a good thing. You never played with that. A lot of good insights there.\r\n\r\nAll right. So why does my site speed vary each time if you know your site speed with two different tools, you frequently get two different test results even if B tests back to back some of the factors that could influence this are the speed of the Internet. At that particular time, or the network backbone where you live that actually can make things take longer to get back and forth, could also be the resources available on your server at that moment, like if several people are loading your page or if maybe you've got several sites on your server and at that moment, there's two backups running. Well, that could possibly impact a single site speed. It could also be that Gremlins broke into the Google data center and turned some things and you know, who knows? Nobody knows why. Ultimately, it just happens that way.\r\n\r\nBut this is the big question, which is okay. Why is my site so much slower on mobile than it is on desktop? Like if we go let me go back to our guest profile here?\r\n\r\nIf we run the speed test on desktop?\r\n\r\nIt is going to be probably half a second\r\n\r\nish\r\n\r\nYeah, so one second, right. And that's twice as fast as it was on mobile. And there's some reasons for this. First of all, it's the way Google is simulating the mobile visit. So what they do, they're actually simulating a slow connection. And so you can actually if we run this again, and we do a mobile test, it'll show you that they are in fact, throttling your bandwidth and they are throttling the processor speed. So Google lighthouse and measure are assuming a mobile connection at 1.6 megabits that is so slow.\r\n\r\nIt's the bottom 25% of 4g connections, and the top 25% of 3g connections. So they're assuming a very, very slow connection to the internet. For the for the modern day. They're also assuming a slower processor. So they simulate performance on older mobile phones, and do CPU limiting to do that, which means that pages WordPress that have deep div trees on page content that are all positioned by CSS and you have to load JavaScript, if the phones if it's an old phone, it's gonna take longer because it takes longer for the phone's processor to render all that stuff. And so if we take a look here, we'll notice that\r\n\r\nemulated by a Moto G power with Lighthouse 11.2. Now Moto G power phone want to anybody want to guess when that was\r\n\r\nwas released four years ago right so it's a four year old phones or the old slower phone with a slow 4g throttling connection. So it's just it's always going to be slow. always going to be slow because of the way Google is emulating mobile. So yeah, and just by the nature of how WordPress works, it takes JavaScript load, it takes a dip tree, it takes CSS, it just takes longer to load the pages. So what do we do about this? Now here's where we get into some of the plugins and advice. The first thing I mentioned this earlier, the first thing to really pay attention to is caching. Now some quality web hosts provide you with an object cache. Many of the Managed WordPress platforms like Nexus, offer a built in object cache. Now why is this important? An object cache takes flat pages that were fetched from the database and actually creates an object that can be loaded instead of every time the page loads, having to go out to the database, grab something, come back and then display it. So it really speeds up the loading of a site. This shows up in the initial server response time. So if you're looking and trying to diagnose where your speed is, having trouble, one of the items is initial server's response time or TTFB. time to first byte. If that's high, it's because you don't have good caching in place. Because it's taking a while to go out, grab the database, come back, load the page, send it to the browser, right. So caching will help that So there's several good WordPress caching plugins as well. There'll be Super Cache WP Total Cache. Both of those are fine. If you're in a hosting environment where caching is provided absolutely use their system. We as an agency use a lightspeed server. Lightspeed is an Apache replacement that has an object cache and a corresponding WordPress plugin that puts all the magic together.\r\n\r\nAnd it works great, right? So you've got to have a caching solution period.\r\n\r\nSecond, are these all in one optimization plugins Now, if you're serious about website optimization, you need a solid no pun intended plugin that includes a full suite of tools. That includes things like page caching, browser caching, Jesup, asset optimization, all this stuff.\r\n\r\nSo you need a plug in and this is one of those things that you're going to want to invest money in because the free versions of things are often there's a big difference between the free version and paid version on most of these plugins, with the odd exception of WP amuse hummingbird. The free version is really pretty darn good.\r\n\r\nSo if you're looking for an all in one plugin, I mean, I'm not a fan of dope PMU in general, but it's probably the best single free standalone optimization plugin out there. The Pro version gives you a few extra features and some CDN features as well. But like this is a good place to start. I actually like hummingbird quite a bit.\r\n\r\nThe dopey rocket is probably parent has asked me if I've tried perf matters. I have the it doesn't do caching. So I'm suggesting taking an all in one optimization approach. Hurst matters is great for asset optimization. It's also really easy to break your site with perf matters. You really have to know what you're doing like it's geek level eight out of 10 at least, to get that up and working. Although the developers great, very responsive, it's just you know, we've taken in my agency, we've taken a different approach.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, Perf Matters is great. So WP Rocket probably the best, all in one overall.\r\n\r\nIt is really expensive. All things considered, but it does solve the problem and for the most case, it has caching it has an asset optimization. This is the one we've chosen because it integrates with our server software Lightspeed the plug that here here don't miss this. Okay. The plugin is free in the WordPress plugin directory, but I would not use the free plugin. If you're not using Lightspeed server. Okay? You can actually do some things up pretty easily with this. But if you're using Lightspeed server, which usually costs a fair amount for the license for your server, then you definitely want to use Lightspeed cache because they're a beautiful combination. Okay, any questions about this? stuff so far? Is everybody with me?\r\n\r\nAssume from the silence that we're all good.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nScrolling on down, okay, image optimization. This is also one of those areas. That if you're going to be a professional WordPress developer, you need to invest in an image optimization solution. It is super expensive, super important to spend a little money and get a good solution for this issue because like I said, image optimization is probably the first place you want to start with PageSpeed optimization. Because clients and people who aren't really sure what they're doing upload ginormous images to WordPress, and why is my homepage taken forever? Well, you have a six megabyte image in your hero area. That's why so we need a plug in it's gonna go take care of that stuff. Now. Yes, I know, you can optimize like in Photoshop or something and then upload those images. It takes so much time to do that, like oh, just by the image optimization plugin, and don't worry about it anymore. So the result of the premium version, there's free versions of most of these out there. The results of the premium level of these image optimizers is significantly higher. They're way better than the free alternative. Like there's a whole other level of optimization these get that will often result in half the size images of the free version. It is significantly better.\r\n\r\nSo pay for this. This is something just to pay for.\r\n\r\nThe image compression results between the top WordPress image optimizers are so close that it doesn't really matter. So the point is, Okay, which one do I like the best, which has the user interface that I like, and who's got a deal that I can get? Right, those are your two decision points. One is not necessarily better. As far as the results go. The user interface can vary dramatically between these. So get one that you're comfortable with and you don't mind and so forth. Billy? Yes. Lightspeed does also include image optimization. We've not gotten into it. I know some people were pretty satisfied with it. We use a standalone image optimizer, we actually use E dub.\r\n\r\nSo we have not really gotten into it. I understand it works pretty well. But it's not something we're using Lightspeed for right now. A great article here on just looking at all the different options, but like I said, e dub is what we've chosen as an agency, but honestly, main reason is because I got a lifetime deal on AppSumo a couple years ago. The interface is really geeky. Took a little while to get used to E dub is also currently back on AppSumo. But it's not as good as it's not a unlimited sites deal like it had before. But it's there's several sites on there. It's worth looking at. Some other ones are short pixel optimal image of phi. I think Melanie just mentioned.\r\n\r\nImagery. Do you mean image of phi melody? I think this is the one from WP Rocket image of phi.io. Yep, it's really good. Works with that EP rocket. Yeah, so if you're going to do the rocket, this would be a good pair with it. And of course the old fashioned and the old standbys smash the PME plugin. We quit using it because it doesn't delete the original large size images, which is ridiculous.\r\n\r\nOkay, any other questions on image optimizers before we roll forward\r\n\r\nAll right, let's talk about something else. That is one of those silver bullet things that is proposed, oh, your site is slow. You should just have a CDN that's going to solve your problems. The answer to that is no. That is not the answer. That is not going to solve your problem. Unless you're dealing with a very high traffic website. If you're having a what I would call a typical website for us, wherever you might get some visitors but it's not like 1000s and 1000s of visitors every hour. You don't need a CDN. In that case. CD ends in my experience for the typical client that we serve are not helpful at all for speed. Actually, they can slow the site down. In some cases, it's much better to invest in faster hosting than it is to have a CDN unless your site is really high traffic. So the reason for this is CDN is used to be great because in just stepping back a minute for a CDN is a content delivery network. CDN will pull your images up into the cloud and serve the images from the cloud several at a time as the page is loading. Now that was really helpful many years ago before the advent of HTTP two because under HTTP 100 means a little journey into geek land here. But with HTTP one, the web's web server would load one thing at a time, give me the CSS, give me the HTML, one image to image three and like that. HTTP two has been around for years. And it allows multiple requests. So it's pulling in JavaScript and CSS and HTML and images and all that stuff all at once. It's making multiple requests, pulling in those things at once. And so that primary original uses for a CDN is no longer needed. If your server is running HTTP two, if your server is not running HTTP two, find a new host because it's been around forever and there's no good reason not to use it. Now, if you're on a slow hosting, you might benefit from CDN that's hosting fixes this for the most part.\r\n\r\nThere are free CD ends like Cloudflare and others. Don't use those. Please don't use the free CDN. It's not going to help. It's going to slow things down. The same in my experience. Also it like it's an asset CDN. Like for example, WPM you hummingbird gives you a free or at the pro level. They include a CDN for your assets like JavaScript and CSS. As well as for images if you're using Smosh jetpack does this also know they're just not? They're not fast. It I when I use these things, it slows down in virtually every test I've ever run. Now, there may be some people out there that have had different results but in my experience it adds a layer of complication to things in the troubleshooting like maybe something that the CDN or cider like it adds more complication, and it doesn't benefit speed. So I just, I would advise you to ignore these. Now a premium CDN like the Cloudflare premium might help you if you have a high traffic sites. So that would be my recommendation. If you got a site with super high traffic, bring in the premium clouds and that will probably help but none of these other options are very good.\r\n\r\nAlso, by the way, I Cloudflare offers a per site license called Cloudflare APO automatic platform optimization that works pretty well with WordPress and does a lot of this optimization for you in the cloud.\r\n\r\nIt costs like $5 per site per month. So it can get pricey depending on how many sites you have. But it's a good it's a good solution. We have one client that's using it and likes it.\r\n\r\nYeah. So Karen is mentioning the the lifetime deal for E dub that is on AppSumo it's $99. But the catch the catch is it is only for 10 sites and the deal is not stackable, so\r\n\r\n$10 More for unlimited, I don't think\r\n\r\nyeah, there now there's no unlimited deal anymore\r\n\r\nsites. Interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, I would totally grab this if that's true. Okay, that this is different, like within the last week, because there was there's that you can find. I just read this because in preparing and updating my guide here Yeah, wow. Okay. So I think that was added since last week. Because there was even a question about that. And they said, No, we're not offering the unlimited deal anymore. So the people that app sumo apparently prevailed upon e dub. And yeah, so if you need an image optimizer, it's a pretty good deal. Just be aware that you eat dub is not the greatest user interface. You really you need to go through and understand the settings and take some time. Once you get it. You've got it. And like we have all our base in the base site. All the settings are pre done for each job though. They don't change. But you it takes some time investment to learn how it's set up. It's not the most intuitive UI Okay, that's my caveat. That being said, I love it. I use it.\r\n\r\nA class on eat up I don't know.\r\n\r\nIf you bug me in office hours, I can I wouldn't mind walking through my settings in the base site, but that's a good Office Hours question. How's that?\r\n\r\nYeah, Liz. Right. So I'm not crazy. You look at that last week or last month during the Starter Site course. And it wasn't that way. Right? So I'm not nuts. Thank you Liz for confirming at least that part. Okay.\r\n\r\nAll right. That actually brings us to the end here of well shoot that we have time right now to look at Edom settings. Is that Is that worth time right now? Would that be helpful?\r\n\r\nOkay, that's a lot of yeses.\r\n\r\nLet me do this. Okay. Some of you I know aren't using E dub and you might not care about this and you want to drop off. So let's do this. questions right now that do not pertain to E dub. I will answer those now. Anything that I missed earlier in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe'll ask those now. And then if you're not using YNAB, and you want to drop off, you can do that and you won't miss anything. Tomorrow, we're going to pick right up here with repairing a site for the client. And I'm going to show you the plugin that I wrote that I've made available to you that will allow you to drop a Kadence element in the WordPress dashboard. Lead aren't cool. It's definitely beta. But yeah.\r\n\r\nOkay, any other questions? Not Eat up, Shannon? Oh, by the way, Shannon, you're only chatting with me if you flip the two in the chat. area to everyone and everybody can see your question. So Shannon, is asking how do you convert images to web P great question that would be handled by your image optimization plugin. And so I'm about to show in either how that I have that set up. But when we upload a JPEG for example, to a site, it automatically crunches out all the sizes for the site and makes the conversion to web P all at the same time. So you can do that in desktop software, but like why, you know let the let the the WordPress plugin do that for you.\r\n\r\nSo all of these options, all these options here, either been short pixel, etcetera, all of those will convert to web P for you.\r\n\r\nOkay, if there are no more questions, I will go and find\r\n\r\nmy settings in our base site just a minute. Okey dokey.\r\n\r\nI'll actually see Yeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. So here's my base site.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm just so we're at settings an E dub. And it's really that y'all it's ugly, ugly plugin, but it's does all the things. Okay. So the first thing I do is there's a button up here called Ludicrous mode. And that's what I go into to get all the settings available because I really want granular control over what Edom is doing. So that's what you see here. If you first load the plugin, you're not going to see all these extra settings, but I'm in Ludicrous Mode. I've dropped in my API key. This by the way, is the only thing that makes this premium is the plugin is the same from free to premium. It's when you drop in your API key that you'll get when you buy a license. That's what bumps up your level to get better compression. So there's all this extra stuff here by the way.\r\n\r\nEDA includes a thing called Twist performance, that's an optimizer. Also easy IO, which is image optimizing CDN. I've not gotten into any of those things I don't. For my use case, it's not helpful, but it's got all these extra things you might want to take a look at so I will, I'm just gonna go straight down each page and let you see the settings I use. So I remove all the metadata, all the all the extra meta that's in photos, just it makes them smaller. We're going to set our max width and height at 2560.\r\n\r\nSo this way, if somebody uploads a seven megapixel image, it's going to reduce it down to size and get rid of the large size. So this is helpful to add the height width dimensions into the image as it's loaded on the front end to reduce cumulative layout shifts. We're also going to turn on lazy loading and automatic scaling. A scrolling down this is where we turn on web T.\r\n\r\nWe're also I've found that these two checkmark checkboxes help with web P loading correctly.\r\n\r\nAnd so actually, we don't have the next thing set here. Save this, it's if it's\r\n\r\nthere's usually right here and it's probably because of the environment we're in right here. But there's usually a box that shows if Web UI is working or not.\r\n\r\nThat should be showing up here but it's not.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's move to local. This is where we set our compression levels. This is critical. So JPEG Premium Plus that's the best compression you can get.\r\n\r\nIt's kind of the balance between best looking image and best compression. King same way Premium Plus GIF optimization pixel perfect PDF. This is also nice. This will optimize a PDF, the images inside a PDF that can make it gigantic. This will actually optimize those images and make your PDF significantly smaller without noticeable loss of quality.\r\n\r\nSVG optimization as well we'll turn that on default. And then I want to turn off backup originals because if I don't do that, Edom is going to save the original image and it's just going to make the Media Library even larger and larger. I don't want it to save the originals. In the advanced settings, I don't think there's anything checked here.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nIn the Resize area, you can disable resizes on any of these image sizes that you want.\r\n\r\nAnd you can allow the resizing of existing images not a whole lot here. I don't think I don't think I think these are all the advanced and resize these are all default settings. Convert. Delete originals remove original image from the server after successful conversion. This single function is what got me to move away from Smash years ago, because they weren't doing that and media libraries were getting gigantic.\r\n\r\nAlso, this is really helpful. You'll want to decide if this is what you want to do. But ping to jpg How many of you have had people but we have a magazine site that we do and they are horrible about doing a screenshot of an image and then uploading that ping. And it's massive, right? It should be like a 50k. jpg, and it's like a one megabit one megabyte ping file. So this will automatically detect that if it's not like a background like a like a image on a on a background.\r\n\r\nThat should be a ping, it converts it to a JPEG automatically. So I like that a lot.\r\n\r\nAlso gift to ping conversion like this. No warnings here. Just do it. If somebody uploads a GIF convert it to a ping and that's it.\r\n\r\nLet's see here override. I didn't change anything here from the default. I don't believe that goes up to a whole new thing. That's it. Yep. So those are my settings.\r\n\r\nThat's it now once if you put it up on a site that has something else has been on before, you can go down here to bulk optimize, and run the bulk optimizer to see if we need to optimize anything. And it'll run through and do all the optimization for you and through the whole site.\r\n\r\nOkay, well that was all the settings in EDA that didn't take long.\r\n\r\nLet me scroll up see what I missed here.\r\n\r\nShannon is using tiny ping because it's it's included in Nexus hosting channel. I don't know if tiny ping does web p or not.\r\n\r\nI just don't know the answer to that. Oh, and it appears the E dub deal is $10 per month. Not $10. One time I thought that was too good to be true, honestly. Yeah.\r\n\r\nBeth says if I switch from smushed to eat DAB I'm not going to get even more images and copies. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo if you switch from Smash to E dub, there's a couple of things you need to do.\r\n\r\nYou need to go in to the like you have to do this in a file manager or something and get into the file structure and look under wp content because there will be a folder called Smash web P or something like that. I think it's smashed dash web p where smash put all the web pig images that converted you'll need to delete that because at that point, it's just taking up space. It's not helping you. The other thing you'll want to do is go under tools. So before we were under Settings and E dub, now you go under Tools and E dub. And you're going to go through and do remove converted originals. So that's going to wipe out all the big original files that Smosh did not delete for you so you'll want to let E dub re optimize all your images, and then run in here and remove converted originals that'll clean you up.\r\n\r\nDoes that answer your question that you want if you do that you won't have additional images and copies.\r\n\r\nAll right. Any other questions, comments, snide remarks on this? So we've gone a long way today we have we've talked about getting our site spun up, building out all the things we're ready for development. And we've just pretended we built the site and ready to go now we're doing our final speed optimizations for the site. We've walked through what speed optimization looks like, what the priorities are, and, yeah, so it's pretty good, pretty good way that we've come today. Tomorrow again, we'll be starting off with preparing a site for the client and getting the admin area ready for a client to interact with. And then in the last hour tomorrow, we'll be talking through a website launch process, so that we don't forget anything when we launched the site because if you're like me, you have forgotten many things when launching a client site and it's never good. All right, um, let's see, Jeanne will either replace the JPEGs with web P images on the front end? Yes. So that's the point. It will go through. When you upload a JPEG it will convert the jpeg to a web p and then it does its thing in the back end to show web P images on the front end. Yep, that's all done for you. And by the way, most good image optimization plugins, the premium ones are going to do that they have their own way of creating the web p and then making sure that shows on the front end for you.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. I can't believe we're finished five minutes early. This usually takes a lot longer. Maybe I just talked faster today. Hello. Okay, well, that gives you five more minutes to do some things to start working on your site spin up checklist. So I'd encourage you to take that first list. If you want some homework to take home for tonight. Take that first list of a starter spin up process and just pull that into a checklist that you can use. And the next time you deploy your starter site, run through that list, and then make adjustments for yourself as you go. So take some time to do that. I will be back tomorrow, same time one o'clock Central for day two of optimizing your starter site here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome if you're just coming in to zoom, open up the chat and say hello, checking question is what your biggest takeaway from day one was yesterday? Hey, Bill, he just having a checklist. Checklist goes a long way. Yes. All right. So captions should now be working for all.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. Let me hear from you in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from yesterday was? The link for the course handbook is there it's the same link as yesterday. We're on page 19.\r\n\r\nclass time to redo those checklists. Checklists, always they're always in flux. There's all you know, they're a living document. Hopefully you're iterating and making them better every time.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. We're just about a little over a minute before we get started with day two of optimizing your starter site. The link is in the chat for the course handbook\r\n\r\nYeah, so that does make a difference. Oh, yes, Stacy. The global palette CSS is mighty helpful.\r\n\r\nFor sure.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. We're a little less than a minute to go before we get started. Glad you're all here we are talking about optimizing our starter sites day two of the course today. Many many things to show you.\r\n\r\nHave two dogs making noise on the floor. So hopefully they'll keep the racket down.\r\n\r\nAll\r\n\r\nright, glad you're all here today. As you are coming in to zoom out. Let me hear from you in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from yesterday was anything stand out is more helpful than other things. I'd love to hear about that in the chat. We are just about to get started.\r\n\r\nI see that sounds like a good office hours. Question.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's go ahead and get started with day two.\r\n\r\nWelcome everybody today to of optimizing your starter site for 2023. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. And this is our second day of taking our Starter Site to the next level. So last month, we talked all about building that Starter Site is sort of a base for all of our future client work to replicate and move forward this month. We're surrounding that base site with a bunch of processes and checklists to make using it more and more part of our workflow. So we talked yesterday about a spin up process of what is probably the most efficient way to replicate the site and then build out the sections one after another in the in a logical order. Then the we also talked about optimizing doing some speed optimizations and what the priorities should be with that. Now today we're we are going to pretend in this process that we have completed our site, and it's now just about time to turn the site over to the client. So the first hour today we're going to be looking at preparing a site for the client. And in the second hour we'll actually be looking at a launch checklist that you can use to one step at a time. I get that site live. So that's where we're heading today. We have a lot to talk about. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello, I am dropping in once again, the slides for today or the course handbook for today. And the replay link. It usually takes about an hour or so to get that up when we're done. We'll we'll have that up for you to review directly then as it does all the rendering and gets ready to go.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's talk today about getting a site ready to hand over to the client, the whole pre launch process. So let's start with a pretty foundational question. It is one that is frequently debated in Facebook groups that cater to people like us. And it's all about you know, should you really give a client access as an admin to the back end of their site. And there's lots of different opinions on this. Some people believe that only you as a developer ought to have this access. Others believe that clients ought to be given admin access. And I think my opinion on this has not changed for many years. It really comes down to so many times we deal with a rescue site where the developer has disappeared. Or maybe it's even a situation where there's an adversarial relationship between the developer and a client. And you know, there's a problem there. And when a client doesn't have admin access to a site that they have purchased, that creates a problem that really puts the client in a bad situation. So I just believe as a matter of principle that clients ought to have admin access for the website that they own. Right. It's their website. It's like, you can rent this office but you can't have the keys. That just doesn't make sense, right.\r\n\r\nthey've purchased this website it belongs to them, they ought to have an administrator login. Now, with that comes the caveat of should the client log in as an admin to make edits to their website? Absolutely not. So I give clients and administrator login but only for use in case of emergency so if we get hit, somebody gets hit by bus like I'm not around anymore. The my whole business falls apart, whatever. At least the client has something you know, some way to get in and do something to the website. So I create the admin user but I also create an editor user that is for the typical logging in for the client to the website to make changes. And so there's even a stipulation in the contract that says if you break things as an admin, it's billable, right? So we're not beyond restoring a backup. We're not going to fix anything that you do if you log in as administrator. This is not for the logging into your website and making changes. So that's the way I approach that I'm happy to entertain questions about that in the chat. But I feel like that's a fairly common approach. And it just makes the most sense to me.\r\n\r\nSo once we get over the fact, you know, how are we going to give the client access? Let's make it a little prettier for them, shall we? So I think the next thing we need to start thinking about is we're preparing a site for the client is customizing the login experience. With a few just a few minutes of your time, just like customizing a 404 page, customizing the standard plain WordPress login page. Doesn't take long and you can really do some nice stuff with a really good plugin. So just a few small details, like just adding the client's branding colors will go that sort of thing. It just, it's an extra little touch. And it's something that I would recommend doing so there's plenty of code snippets that lets you change out the logo. There's a number of different plugins that will allow you to change how the login area looks. This is the one that I currently am a fan of it's called login page, our custom login page Customizer by Hardeep us Ronnie now for a long time we had recommended another plugin, that one has had a few issues and there's there's a lot of upgrade nags that that plugin is starting to create. So we actually featured this on a plugin roundup a few months back, and this is the one that I think is a really good one to use. So let me make some space here. And we'll get over here and activate login page customizer.\r\n\r\nThis by the way is a plugin that has a lot of installs and and good ratings. It's 90,000 install base. You know there's a lot of folks using this plugin. So we're gonna skip the Freemius stuff here. And we now have a this is the only thing I don't like about this plugin. It does add a top level menu item, but we're gonna hide that in a minute anyway, so here's login page customizer. And so there's a number of things that we can take a look at as far as settings. Do we want to keep the Remember Me option. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Do you want to have both user name and email address or just one of the other as options to log in. We'll use both and delete all the settings if you want to install Okay, so just we're leaving the basic settings here. And we're going to go here into our pages or actually, we're gonna go to customizer. Now, one of the things that this and most of the plugins that do login page customizations using the customizer, the approach that they take, is that there actually yes is a page.\r\n\r\nLet me go back here and I'll show you here in the\r\n\r\nthere is a page called login customizer now, what happens, and I don't know if you can, so you can see, I don't know if that's automatically left out of the sitemap or not that Sue's question is, you know, is this going to show up in the sitemap? And I think once we turn on something like Yoast, and if we edit this page now, I think and this would be something you'd want to do in your base site. But we can just go down here and tell it Hello, are you advance?\r\n\r\nDon't show this in the search results. Don't follow any links did actually this is all really need. Okay, so we can do that one time in our base site. And yeah, and most SEO plugins have a way to remove a page from being indexed in the sitemap that they create. So that's what I would do there. Do it in your base site. That way it's never going to be listed.\r\n\r\nSo yeah.\r\n\r\nAnd by the way, it's not a a real page in the sense like it's listed in pages, but you can't access that page. Unless you're logged in. It forces you to the homepage as I recall or someplace. Like if we go to this link, and we do an incognito window\r\n\r\nso it forwards you to the homepage. So it's not a big deal. Either way, but this keeps out of the sitemap even if it's in the sitemap it's just going to track as a redirect back to your your homepage. It's not a big deal. But here's the plugin. It works pretty nicely. You can start off with some templates here. You like the regular WordPress view? Do you want to do a background color? You know how do you want to do this? Well, let's just do let's start off here. And our background we can do a color we can do an image if we want. Let's do something like Oh no, this is kind of cool.\r\n\r\nDrop that in\r\n\r\nokay, it's not my favorite but it'll work.\r\n\r\nSo you can make some changes there regarding the background.\r\n\r\nYou can change out here the logo to something else if you'd like we'll just drop in. This isn't gonna work well because it's dark on dark but you get the idea. We can make the logo more bigger, etc. You got padding and so forth. Where does the logo click take you? Yeah, so or you can just disable the logo altogether if you'd like.\r\n\r\nSo it just drops you straight down through here and we want to put a background image on the forum. You can do that even if you'd like to that's kind of interesting. Otherwise you can set the color the padding all you have control over all of these items. Right here in a standard\r\n\r\ncustomizer.\r\n\r\nYeah, that works really nicely.\r\n\r\nClicking the button settings you have all the options here. So the one thing I like about this one also is that you can even put in your own custom CSS right here in this plugin. That's something the other plugin did not offer. So kind of cool. You can spend a little time you see how quickly like oftentimes what I'll do is whatever hero image I'm using on the homepage, I'll put that in the login page. It's kind of nice drop in the client logo. Good to go. Pretty neat. Yeah, Tina was saying the old customizer plugin you could\r\n\r\nyou weren't able to edit the login page in the customizer. Okay, I'm not sure about that. Just try this new plugin, but it'll probably work better for you.\r\n\r\nAlright, so it makes sense. Just spend an extra couple of minutes here. As you're wrapping up development. It's a nice touch. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is work on cleaning up the website dashboard. Now in last month's course I gave you code snippets that would specifically unset each of the dashboard, the default dashboard widgets in the admin area of the world of WordPress, and you know, that's nice to clean things up. But there are a few other things that I like to clean up in WordPress. You can use a there's a great plugin that I like and I've recommended it for years. It is called advanced Access Manager. This is actually the very first training I ever did years ago here was on this plugin, and it was I think, in 2013. So like 10 years ago, I've been using this plugin for that long on every client site. It's really good I've met the developer. He's a great, great guy, and is committed to this plugin. It has a huge install base. It's rock solid. So let's kind of get into this. So one of the things I like to do, as I'm preparing a site for the client, is to simplify everything like you go into a custom post type and there's all these, you know, Netta boxes along the side that are they don't really pertain to this or we want to hide them or whatever. So let's just clean all that up and make it a lot simpler to use. So even here, like going here in the Add New Page, and you know what, it's it's striking me I'm not sure how this is going to work in the block editor.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna give it a try and see how it's gonna go. Let's go ahead and activate advanced access manager. Okay, it's already active. So there's a few things so working on simplifying all pulling menu items out simplifying meta boxes. There's some good reasons to do that. Just make it easier for your client to use. Also, you can use solid central to simplify menus, that functionality is there. It's been there for years. However, it's user by user unfortunately, it's not by role, and I'd really prefer to set it up by role so that all the editors for example on the on the site that our customer you know, client type logins all get the same menu items hidden. And so you can do with solid central but you have to do it one user at a time. This is something I'm hoping that there'll be tweaking as they are going to be doing some serious work on solid central next year.\r\n\r\nSo let's focus in on a m here.\r\n\r\nThe one thing to be aware of with advanced access manager is is a very large plugin. It does a lot of different things. But the developer has created it in such a way that it's modular so you can turn off the stuff in the plugin that you're not using. And so it doesn't load that code. It makes it very light for the use case that we're going to have. And it's really, really pretty cool. So let's take a look at how to do that. So we're gonna go let's just if we're only using advanced access manager to simplify menus and meta boxes, here's the settings that recommend that you use. So we're gonna go to Advanced Access Manager settings and services settings is here in services is here. Now the first thing I'd suggest that you do is drop this all the way down and just show all the things on one page. Because there are a few that spill over into the next page and you might not realize that and not might not get all the settings. So I would suggest disabling everything other than admin menu and meta boxes and widgets. But we're just going to take a cruise down here so you can see all the things that it does. It does a number of things about securing the WordPress login.\r\n\r\nIt allows it has its own capabilities admin menu we want so that's one of them.\r\n\r\nWe don't want to get into the toolbar management.\r\n\r\nWe don't want it to manage capabilities although we good let's leave that on and I'll show you why that'll be important in just a minute. Turn this off. We don't want to have it changing any access to any URLs or posts in terms like he does so many things.\r\n\r\nWe're not using multi site we don't need shortcodes all like you can redirect based on Access Denied message as you can if you're doing a login redirect, you can use this plugin for that as well. We do want meta boxes and widgets. And we're not going to get into dopey CLI or that or any kind of redirects for log outs or four Oh fours or any of these things. Either. So we really just have these three things on I'm going to leave capabilities in place because I'm going to show you something with that in a minute. This will allow you to add a capability to a user role. And there's something that will be helpful to us with that in just a minute.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we've turned off the services right here. Now we're going to go into our core settings and we're going to disable all\r\n\r\ndisable all that so we don't want to Okay, we are going to leave the capabilities editor on we don't need this we don't need this and we don't need this. Alright, so we're going to turn those things off. We're going to leave on capabilities because we're going to use that in just a minute.\r\n\r\nI've given you some additional information about some of the things that you might want to use an advanced Access Manager. Now again, this is something that I would probably do in the base site. So get these they're going to be the similar for every site. We're going to get that set in the base site. So this part that we just did, will already be there when we replicate it for future work. Right. So let's just reload our page here and we're going to notice that things like for example here.\r\n\r\nThis menu used to be way down here long. So it's really simplified the scope of this plugin and what it's actually doing.\r\n\r\nAll right, so what we're going to do at this point is we're going to jump in to our editor user, so we're going and one thing that's frustrating about this plugin, he does use mystery meat navigation, meaning who knows what these icons mean until you mouse over them a little frustrating. It's always been like this. Anyway, we're going to manage this role.\r\n\r\nSo up here at the top, it tells you what you're working on. If we wanted to.\r\n\r\nIf we wanted to do administrator, you can see we're on that now we're going to work on our editor user.\r\n\r\nAnd what you can see that we're working on here this is our back end menu items. So this is what does the editor role see in this list right here. Now, by the way, if you wanted to do user by user, you can do that. Like here's the only two users on the site. So you could for example, have some settings pertaining to roll. But then on this particular user of that role, it could be even a little different. So that's really helpful.\r\n\r\nThis also, by the way, would let you have a client who has an administrator user, but you're still hiding some things from them. If you wanted to do that.\r\n\r\nAlright, so we are in the editor role, just be sure we're there. Okay. Now, everything here pertains to things that are in this menu. So what I like to do is go down and notice this is grayed out because typically the editor doesn't have access to the stream menu settings, I like to just go ahead and restrict it anyway. And if you've been an advanced Access Manager user before, what you may realize, okay, this has changed these used to be checkboxes. Now there's an open lock and a closed lock which is a little better of a UI, because you used to have to check the box and checking on means turning off and it wasn't not quite intuitive.\r\n\r\nLike one of the things I would do here is okay, in most client sites that we have, we use in posts we use categories but not tags. So I'm going to just turn off the tags menu, because they don't need it.\r\n\r\nMedia, right forms. We're going to come back to this one in just a minute.\r\n\r\nPages are good. I don't want them to see this menu. Under Appearance. I don't want them to see themes or widgets or this will give them elements.\r\n\r\nI don't want them to get in the customizer will let them edit menus, but I don't want them in the Kadence settings. So we can turn off all those submenu items. We do not by any means want them in the Plugins menu.\r\n\r\nUsers will leave alone tools we don't want them in that settings. We don't want them in that. Yoast SEO we'll leave alone for now. Advanced Access Manager definitely restrict Oops, no I didn't.\r\n\r\nCome back. Editor am we want this restricted? Yes. Backups. I don't want them to see that.\r\n\r\nKadence blocks. Let's lock them out of that in private site. It won't be there anyway when we launched but we'll go from there. Okay, now let's see how this actually looks. I'm gonna go over here to my list. And I've got a plug in active called user switching.\r\n\r\nAnd this is a classic plugin we've used for a long time. It's in the base stack that I gave you last month and what this gives us is a context link under editor or we can easily just switch to this user. So let's switch and see how Cloudflare see how our menu is simplified. Now.\r\n\r\nAll those things just aren't there. We don't have tags. It's a very simple menu. We hire and I explain this to the client. We create this editor user for you where all the breakable parts of WordPress are hidden then you can't accidentally get into something and change a setting that breaks your website.\r\n\r\nMy clients are typically happy that we do this for them. You know they don't want to accidentally break their website Ceu do I block them from Kadence blocks? No, no, just that menu item. They don't really typically need that.\r\n\r\nYou can still use Kadence blocks in the editor that was only hiding the menu.\r\n\r\nAnd if you want to do it differently, you can no big deal let's go back to and by the way, the great thing about user switching is that in three places you can get back to your user if you're on the front end.\r\n\r\nHere under the Profile menu, you can switch back, same on the back end and then same right here. So I'm gonna go right back to the user that I just had.\r\n\r\nAll good back to admin. Alright, does that make sense everybody?\r\n\r\nSo we've cleaned up our admin menu for all users in the role of editor. But now also we want to go into meta boxes in widgets.\r\n\r\nAnd here, you'll notice all right, these are the actual front end widgets like in the well appearance, and widgets, these old classic widgets. I really don't. They don't have access to that anyway, so you can with this plugin, hide certain widgets from use.\r\n\r\nWidgets are kind of going going away so we just kind of leave that alone. They don't really have access to those anyway. Here you can see oh, look, we've got dashboard widgets. These are the ones that actually appear here on the WordPress dashboard. So you could hide some of those if you want it to hear, but really what I'm after, are the meta boxes on the individual post types. And these are helpful that I It occurs to me I'm not sure what's going to happen with the block editor here. But I'm going to because they're not really meta boxes. I'm gonna hide tags, custom fields.\r\n\r\nExcerpt Yeah, let's just hide those and see what happens. Because I'm not sure actually.\r\n\r\nI'm second guessing myself on whether this works in the block editor or not. So if we go to add new post, let's see if tags shows up over on over here. Yes, it does. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo that's if you're using the block editor. This is not nearly as helpful as it used to be. But one thing it does do is if you have if you're creating a custom post type that's typically arranged in more of the classic editor view, where it has the traditional metal boxes, and I love to clean up especially custom post types for clients because, you know, will oftentimes have a single block of custom fields for a custom post type, and just hide everything else. And so it's a really nice way to clean those things up.\r\n\r\nAnd the idea is just get Declutter. Get all the stuff out of the way as much as possible. And I'm going to make a note to reach out to vassal about the developer about hiding these things on the back end now Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, was the first time you load advanced Access Manager on a site, it won't see any of these things yet and you have to click refresh. And that way it goes out to the database and it pulls in Oh, good. Patient error. It pulls in all of the registered.\r\n\r\nWhat did that oh, I'm logged in? Yep. Okay.\r\n\r\nI was switched over to the whole man. Am I broken? Let's try this again. I was on the editor user. Okay, now I'm back. Now it should load fine.\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go.\r\n\r\nSo, make sure you hit refresh, because it'll go out and pull out all of the Define meta boxes and widgets and so forth into this area.\r\n\r\nAll right. So the other thing to be aware of here, how many of you have noticed that if you activate Yoast SEO, a whole bunch of more well, actually just two but two new user roles are created SEO editor and SEO manager. I don't like that. I don't like all those extra roles on my site. It's just a personal thing. So what I do and I do this in the base site, because we've set up Yoast SEO, and these roles are created what you can do is actually delete these roles right here. So advanced access manager gives you the ability to create and delete roles in WordPress, all built into the plugin. So I'm going to delete the SEO editor role. Yes.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm going to delete the SEO manager role.\r\n\r\nNow this does create a problem because SEO editor and SEO manager are like the WordPress editor role but it has an additional capability and it is the WP SEO manage options. So this is why I left capabilities on a minute ago. I'm going to go over here into capabilities. And again, we're editing the role editor here. And I'm going to give my editor user that SEO capability. So right here, SEO manage options. I can click that checkbox. And now my standard WordPress editor role has all the capabilities that it needs to access the Yoast options. Does that make sense to everybody?\r\n\r\nkind of clean up the roles.\r\n\r\nYoast does it this way so that certain users can edit the settings\r\n\r\nSue does it recognize Gravity Forms for the editor know what let me show you here.\r\n\r\nIf I thought I had this in the guide\r\n\r\nOh no, that's it's actually a code snippet. Sue, I gave it last month where you can give editor users full access to Gravity Forms.\r\n\r\nShannon does it work with WooCommerce roles? Absolutely. So let's just add WooCommerce and we'll see those new roles pop up over here.\r\n\r\nSo it doesn't the roles aren't goodness. The roles are not defined on the site yet, which is why advanced access manager didn't see it. But as soon as we install and activate WooCommerce we should see those roles appear.\r\n\r\nThat's gonna get us into this wizard we're going to try to jump out of the WooCommerce Setup Wizard.\r\n\r\nIt's creating all the stuff right now\r\n\r\nokay, while it's doing its thing, I'm just going to reload the page here. And we ought to see\r\n\r\nYep, so there's shop manager here.\r\n\r\nAnd I think there's some WooCommerce capabilities. Yeah, right here. So you could we could give our editor these two WooCommerce capabilities, and then we wouldn't need the shop manager role.\r\n\r\nStacy, can you manage Gravity Forms roles, okay? Gravity Forms doesn't have rolls that are associated with it. Notice, Gravity Forms is active. There are no new roles over here. But by default Gravity Forms only allows administrators into some of the settings areas and I like to give editors some of that because editors, for example, only Gravity Forms admin it only administrators can go into Gravity Forms and export form entries. And I like for editors to be able to do that because the client may want to go in and export some of the form data, right? That makes sense. So the code snippet that I gave you last month is what you need to allow editors to do that. It's not something you can manage and roles and capabilities here.\r\n\r\nAll right. Any other questions with this part? Shannon did that get your question?\r\n\r\nA lot of times plugins have hidden roles that help you granularly customize things. And if they're not added to WordPress, you can create this cape a capability right here. And it can be anything like tests\r\n\r\nlike this great the roll. And it is now that capability which doesn't do anything, but it is here in WordPress and usable. And I can assign it to whatever roles that I want and this capability is something that a plugin could say if user can this capability name then do this. So that's how these things are used in WordPress. And so if you need for some reason to add a capability to granularly control what a plugin is doing. Advanced Access Manager lets you do that also. And you can also delete capabilities completely out of WordPress.\r\n\r\nLike that.\r\n\r\nWhat is the line at the top that says changes are permanent? Yeah.\r\n\r\nJust like it says here what I just did by adding or by deleting the capability. It's permanent. I can add it back. But there's no undo in other words\r\n\r\nso he's just suggesting, be sure you have a backup before you start goofing around with capabilities. Oh no. So like we just deleted it. And we could just we could add it back again right here like here's what I just did. I can add it and it's back.\r\n\r\nYep, but it does make permanent. What he's saying is, it does make permanent changes to the database when you do this. So just always have a backup.\r\n\r\nThat's just a good rule of thumb no matter what. Okay? make sense to everybody. And again, these are things that I would probably do most of everything we just did would be settings that I would have in the base site. There just wasn't time last month to go through all of this. But it's a good example of okay, I'm preparing a site for the client. I see all these things I need to do really, okay, I need to make those in my base site also. So that next time I replicate the site, those settings are already done. I never have to do them again. So that's the takeaway. Make sense? Everybody? Everybody good with that?\r\n\r\nAlright, a couple of things here. I'm just going to mention if you want to hide certain blocks and let's let's face it with all the blocks that are available in Core Plus, if you got Kadence blocks or some other block packages, you can have 8 million blocks right and it's almost it's almost overwhelming how many blocks can be in that list. So here's a great plugin. We did this on the plugin roundup A while back, it's Block Manager and Block Manager will let you turn off certain blocks and make them not available in the the selector in the block editor so you can really streamline you know, go through there and see, you know, what am I actually going to use and not like if you're using Kadence. Maybe you don't want to have the standard heading block. You want to use the advanced text block because it's better, right those sorts of things and just kind of clear out, get rid of any redundant blocks and just make things easier to use.\r\n\r\nWidget disabled works the same way with classic WordPress widgets. If you want to get rid of those. You can also do that with advanced access manager. And again, it does the same thing. There. Okay, so adding some help videos. This is always a good thing to do for your clients. For years. I've used video user manuals, it is something that we refer clients to semi regularly. It is a premium plugin. We do have a deal I verified this a couple of weeks ago that it's still working, but video user manuals.com\/i themes gets you a deal like $100 off per year. So it's basically $12 a month and you get these regularly updated videos in the dashboard. They work really really well and if you're a beaver builder Gravity Forms user they also have videos about beaver builder and gravity forms that have WooCommerce videos. It's really good. So I recommend this saves a lot of time. There's also a an actual manual for people who like to read stuff that's all it's all built in. It's all automatically update as WordPress changes. There's videos for the block editor and for the classic editor, and you can choose like if the site's not running WooCommerce You can deselect the WooCommerce videos and they won't show up so it's really good does it include Elementor instructions? No, it does not. So it's for serious developers.\r\n\r\nJust kidding. Okay.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAll right. Good on that. Now, I mentioned this a little bit last month as well with using customized help videos. We like the WP help plug in. Right here. It was in the stack last month. And it's a really nice thing to be able to record a loom video or something like loom and then just drop it right in one of these publishing help posts and have a you know, customized, customized help videos for the parts of WordPress that you have tweaked for your client, or here's how you do this. Like maybe you've got a custom post type that's special and it's got these custom fields to do a certain thing on the front end of the site. record a quick video as you're preparing the site for the client of just how these things work. Save it done. That way it's gonna save you time because they're not going to remember how you told them how to do it, but you got a video right there in the dashboard makes it easy.\r\n\r\nOh and by the way if you are already paying for a Vimeo membership, hopefully you've seen their screen recorder. It's free works with Zoom. It's just like a automate works with Vimeo. It's just like loom where you can do a quick screen and then it pushes it out to your Vimeo account. Pretty cool.\r\n\r\nSomething else to consider as we're preparing the site for the client is monitoring client activity. This is definitely something to consider doing. First, first line of defense. If you're running solid security you already have reasonably good user logging in so it's part of the core features of solid security under security logs, all events user logging, and then you can filter it down. Good basic information here. However, if you want some more granular information that's why last month I recommended the stream plugin. This will I mean you get way way way more granular data than the I iThemes part of the solid security log creates because they're designed for two different purposes. The solid security log is there for security logging primarily stream is there to show you exactly the very, very granular things that you did like this was just when I activated WooCommerce you see all the things that happened when I did that.\r\n\r\nYeah, pretty, pretty significant list. Its screen is also really handy. Because you can set up alerts based on certain conditions. So when maybe the client, the editor user\r\n\r\nlet's see when they are let's just say this. Let's pretend like this is the clients administrator user. And if they log in with their administrator user, email me, I want to know that this is super helpful. Right? So like, if you're if my client is logging in with that admin user that I told him was only using case of emergencies, send me an email and let me know so I can go in and see what's going on here. Right. So you can set this up to trigger under lots of different paces. You can have it send you if you're using slack, you can have it push a Slack notice if you're using IFFT it can do a lot of different things. Like it can connect to a Google sheet. And it can log the whatever over here into a Google sheet for you. It's really cool, what stuff you can do there. But anyway, or you can just say hi like this in the log. But there's a lot of things you can do here to set up stream for how you want to track your clients. And so, again for the most part, I would try to have these settings in the base site. But then as you're preparing this site for the client, just go through and make sure that it's tracking and alerting you for the things that this particular site should alert you to All right how about this one, creating a custom dashboard widget.\r\n\r\nWhy should you do this because it's friendly and helpful. And we did that last month and it's cool to have your branding on the dashboard. That's really good.\r\n\r\nThere's a couple of other ways to take though this dashboard widget that we created last month.\r\n\r\nWhere is it? My turned off?\r\n\r\nNo.\r\n\r\nMaybe I pulled it maybe I pulled it from the code anyway. You remember that the widget with the logo and all those things in there we did last month. It's great. No problem but there's a there are better ways to do it.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll start if you're using a page builder. So if you're using Beaver Builder or Elementor Here you go, Beth, you can do this with Elementor. There's a couple of plugins that were created by idea box, which is the creator of power pack for Beaver Builder for Elementor.\r\n\r\nAnd the idea box people have made it such that you can take a saved row or template or whatever Elementor calls it and display that in the dashboard. And it shows up right here. At the top of the dashboard. And it's really nice. You can create your own layout with columns and graphics and buttons and tabs and whatever you want with your page builder and lay it right here on the dashboard. It's really kind of cool.\r\n\r\nHowever, and this is where I want to spend a little bit of time now I have created a plugin that allows you to use a Kadence element for that. So if you're not in a page builder and you're using Kadence blocks, or if you're just using the Kadence theme at all. There hasn't been a way to get a block editor driven client dashboard to show up in WordPress. And so the way I had to kind of go around the world for this to make this happen in this, okay. This plugin is very, very, very, very beta okay. If it breaks your sight, I don't want to hear about it like it's this is you use it on your own risk, okay? However, it's pretty solid for my testing, but I haven't tested it in lots of different environments either. Okay, so no guarantees, no warranties, no support. Like it's on you. Okay. But yeah, it's a very simple plugin. There are three files. There's a PHP file, a JavaScript file and a CSS file. And you can drop all that in chat GPT like I taught you a couple of months ago and tweak it and you know, fiddle around with it, make it your own. But the challenge here and I've even talked to Ben Rittner, about this several months ago, of getting a Kadence element to show up in the dashboard.\r\n\r\nThe problem is like it will work with a shortcode you know, Kadence elements makes a shortcode you could put that in a dashboard box, and it would render something out. However, any of the columns anything like that don't work, because that's relying on CSS and JavaScript that is only loaded on the front end of the site, which makes sense. The block editor only loads that CSS and JavaScript on the front end it's not loading it in the admin area. And it's really, it's really complicated to get that CSS and JavaScript to load in the back end. So it's, it's just, that's not a great way to do it. So what I did was, I put it in an iframe, right? So we can go and we can look at let's just create a Kadence element\r\n\r\nand we will call it Wyant dashboard\r\n\r\nand we'll make it a Content section.\r\n\r\nAnd you can design just like you would with with anything else here. So let's just make I don't know, let's do a three column layout. Over here. We'll do an image. We'll drop in our logo.\r\n\r\nWe'll put in some text here.\r\n\r\nAnd over here, maybe we put our support form we created last month. It will drop into gravity form.\r\n\r\nAnd we're going to watch oops, that one\r\n\r\nthere that wants to form title or form description.\r\n\r\nWe have a really simple dashboard widget here. Right? Now when we get this dashboard created\r\n\r\nyou can view it on the front end it has a URL. So it's you know domain with a question mark Kadence element equals and then whatever you call it the slug, right. So here's our dashboard. It's not awesome, but it's got some stuff. Okay, see where I'm going with this. So now I've given you a link to download the plugin. It is in. It's in Dropbox, you have to click the little download arrow at the top, that Dropbox is probably actually going to uncompress the zip file for you to see what's there in the browser, but there's a little link at the top. Actually, I'll just show you. There's a little link at the top right.\r\n\r\nDid you do to download so click that to download the zip file. But you can see how simple if there's a PHP file, there's a single CSS file.\r\n\r\nAnd there's a single JavaScript file. So it's three three files. Very, very simple plugin, which chat GPT and I created with much anguish over the course of several weeks.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to activate well. It's actually already activated brilliant dashboard is activated. So there's now a settings page here called brilliant dashboard. And the first thing I'm going to do I've got this feature here, which is hide dashboard. Widgets. So if I do that and I go to my dashboard screen notice all my widgets are gone. There's not even a little empty boxes. So this hides everything and even hides the help and Screen Options.\r\n\r\nGet rid of that notice the help and screen options that would have been right there. Right. So we want to make gotta make room just for our thing. Now the second thing this is going to do is it gives us a list of all the Kadence elements currently set up on the site. And here's one we just made client dashboard. I'm going to save that and that's going to load will have too many windows up and that's gonna load it right here.\r\n\r\nBoom, look at that. Okay, we have some margin issues. So let's tweak that.\r\n\r\nYou\r\n\r\nhere's our row. Let's put some padding on our left and right.\r\n\r\nMedium on each and that'll give us a little extra room over here.\r\n\r\nOh, look at that. See where we're at now in that that quick really fast. This is a place you could drop in video. You can do anything here that you can do in the block editor. Pretty cool. Now Sue is asking can you leave it like Yes. So that's why I actually made this option. So if we uncheck this, that's going to show our stuff up here again, and it drops in our dashboard underneath this. So that's, you know, this hides or shows the standard dashboard widgets. So maybe you want both, just leave it unchecked.\r\n\r\nNow what I might do in a later iteration of the plugin is have two checkboxes. One of them says Hide screen options and help and the other one says Hide dashboard widgets for now I just have the one.\r\n\r\nBut that's how it works.\r\n\r\nSo think about all the things you can add in here. And you're only constrained by what the block editor can do. So let me show you what I did.\r\n\r\nThere's a second one in here. I'm just going to there's another element that I created with a slightly more has more features to it. So let's refresh this page. And how about this. There's a tabbed interface at the top.\r\n\r\nSo here's our main page, with buttons and whatever you want. You need help here's a place to ask for help. But look here what if you had a look or studio dashboard for this site\r\n\r\nall this is is an HTML box, an HTML block\r\n\r\nin which I put the embed that Looker Studio gives us So drop in your analytics right here and all of this you know it's it's just like any other Looker dashboard in that cool\r\n\r\nso you do have to be careful. One of the things here is we're dealing with multiple iframes. This is actually an iframe inside of an iframe. It totally works 100% There's no problems. But sometimes the scrolling can be wonky. You just kind of have to if I were going to do this live, I would have a very my look or studio would have a lot of different icons here perhaps, and it would not require a lot of vertical scrolling. So anyway, what I'm trying to do is give you some ideas of how you might use this. So it's again this is just the block editor and it's pushing it out here right there. So\r\n\r\nall right, we have reached a good point for stoppage for a break.\r\n\r\nquestions or questions or comments before we take a break class is asking when is the final version coming? I don't know man.\r\n\r\nI next week, I intend not to do any work whatsoever. Actually, I'm officially as of about 11 o'clock, to about two three hours ago I put in my vacation notice.\r\n\r\nSo I'm not doing much client work. I'm trying not to do very much at all the last few weeks of the of the year. But yeah, I don't know. Definitely not next week.\r\n\r\nThis isn't one of those things. I'm not sure when it's ever going to be final.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, questions comments? Let's see gene recommendation on how to get started with Looker studio. Ah, excellent question. We just happen to have a solid Academy course on this. If you look right here, Google Analytics bootcamp with David Zimmerman. The link is in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe looked at on day two\r\n\r\nDavid got into Looker studio here and he gave us a looker dashboard.\r\n\r\nIn this one didn't he do something with Looker and this one\r\n\r\nI could be wrong\r\n\r\nYeah, I'm pretty sure it's in this Google Analytics bootcamp.\r\n\r\nYeah, cuz we talked about setting up Yeah, and he even gave us a How many of you have used David's dashboard the basic dashboard like he gave us a link and everything would would a premium training on Looker be good for next year? I'm really struggling to put training together for next year.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, that sounds like a lot of yeses. All right. We can sure pull that off\r\n\r\nokay. All right. Any other questions before we get into the launch process\r\n\r\nJean that course also covers that, David in when he talks about in day one or two, one of the days. David talks about goal tracking goals and conversions. So that's the end of day one is what you're looking for here.\r\n\r\nIt's very it's much much much easier to set up goals in Google Analytics. Four than it was previously. Much easier.\r\n\r\nYes, or you can use Google Tag Manager, Stacy is suggesting Okay, anybody else before we take a quick break?\r\n\r\nOkay, Okey dokey. Well, it is just about three minutes till let's take an eight minute break. We're back at five minutes after so break until 205 Central time and we are quiet until then.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, we're back. Final hour of optimizing your starter site for 2023. Who's ready to go let's get this site launched our pretend site that we've been not working on for the past couple of days here. So launch process is absolutely critical. It was the very first checklist I ever made in my business because I realized every time I launched a website, I was forgetting something. And Murphy's Law says that the one thing you forget when you launch a site is probably the most important thing that you should have done. So that's what started me years. ago on this journey of creating checklists and processes. Because what I learned, especially with the launch checklist was I started out just dumping all the things that I need to do into a list and that's great. But then I started to realize, well, if I take number eight and move it up to number three, it actually makes more sense because I'm already in that area or you know, it works better in the flow. And just gradually over the years. I probably started this website checklist. Nine years ago, I would I would imagine something around Yeah, Brown 2013 2014 as when I started this, and I've just iterated slowly, and now it's kind of in three phases. There's the pre launch list, the launch list and the post launch list, which you know, theoretically could be done independently of one another, which is pretty good. So like will often run their pre launch prior to the client giving final sign off on the site.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, okay, so let's talk about this checklist. And you are welcome to use this however, like all these checklists are list of processes have been take it, tweak it, make it your own, make it fit your work, but I think this one in particular I think is just about dialed in to where it should be. So let's talk about some pre launch items for our checklist. And we're this is things that you could do day or two or the day of launch, and we're gonna start with just some checks. So we're gonna go into the domain name and update the TTL just to make sure there's not any delays with DNS propagation to as low as the DNS provider will allow you to go. Many will let you do 300 This number is always in seconds. So that's five minutes. Some will let you do last but most 300 is the lowest it'll go ahead and get that domain set low. At this point, go ahead and run your full backup and download it to local so if you're developing on some server out there, download it to right here so it's on your computer just in case something happens the percentage chance that something will go wrong is directly proportional to whether or not you downloaded that backup. Trust me. Also, next thing we're going to do, this is a big one. We're going to look at every single form or anything else that's going to send email notifications about anything. And just make sure that all the emails are right, that they're going to the right place that not only that but that the from email address matches the domain that the site will be on when it's live. And go ahead and put even though it's in the development domain right now. Go ahead and put the live domain in those form fields where it's going because sometimes if you do a search under plug in the solid backups process and in many backup plugins restoration process, they could depending on how the plugin does it they these might not get updated. If the plugin serializes that information in the database, you can't really find and replace it and sometimes they do that. So anyway, that's why I just say look at everything on the site that's going to send notification emails, make sure those emails are correct. ability. Why are we doing TTL so that when you actually flip the domain, the change happens as fast as possible. Yeah. So oftentimes, the the default for TTL ELLs is four hours, or what is that? Multiply that into seconds?\r\n\r\nAnd it's that number I forget. I forget what it is. But yeah, so why does it take my domain four hours to check well, because you didn't change the TTL. So go ahead and drop that down. You can even do this days ahead of time.\r\n\r\nIt's not gonna hurt anything. All right. So we're also going to check the admin email and on the WordPress side, it's Settings General make sure that is correct where it should be. If it is a rebuild, this is a good time to make sure you've got your redirects Correct. You might have done this already in the development process, but if not, we'll do it as pre launch. If it's a simple site, go out there, build our list of current URLs, make sure they're mapped to the new URLs on the new site, import that into the redirection plugin.\r\n\r\nGo through and make sure all the special pages are set up like our custom login for a four page search results human sitemap, and that the human Sitemap has all the necessary content that it should have. So we're basically just checking our work on these things, making sure these special items are set up. Make sure all our images have alt text unless they are decorative. So we're gonna go through the media library, make sure those are all done.\r\n\r\nCheck e dub or your image optimizer to make sure all the images are optimized and verify on the front end. That web P is working. And oh my goodness, do not forget this. If you're processing payments, make sure that the live adult that the that all the keys are right and especially the web hook, so you got to make sure that the web hook for test and live. Both of those things are set up for the live domain and put into the settings of whatever is processing payments on your site. So don't miss that. All right, so that is our pre launch check list. So now we're actually Oh, Tania, that's later in the list. Yep. So and I'll show you why it's later in a minute.\r\n\r\nSo at this point, we've got our development site. Ready, done. It's everything's checked, everything's ready. So we're going to go over to our new target server where this thing is going to live. We're going to set up the domain over there in my world that would be setting up a cpanel whatever host you do that's do the same thing. I set up the domain there. Go ahead and whatever the passwords are you created for that domain. At this point while you just did it, go ahead and add it into your password manager and into your code editor. Like I use Nova said login and check, do code text editing. Just get all that stuff set up. Now, while you just had the password it's gonna save you time later. Go ahead on in this new environment, set up your new database and user save those credentials to the side for importing later. If you're in cPanel How many times have I done this? Make sure that if you're in cPanel, one second here, all right. If you're in cPanel, and you've just to say we've just set up this new cPanel for the new site, open up File Manager, go into settings and make sure that show dot files is enabled because more than once more than once on a live webinar. I have gone in going where the world is the htaccess file. Oh I forgot to turn on dotfiles just go do it. Now. It's just better to get that done. Because you're already in the new environment. Go ahead and do your dot files. And make sure this is very important. In some hosts. When you deploy a new environment set up a new cPanel there's going to be an existing htaccess file there delete that, because it could interfere with your migration process later.\r\n\r\nAll right, next thing I'm going to do is in my dev site, I'm going to set up solid security, verify those Notification Center emails. Make sure that so a lot of times when we're doing development we'll go ahead and have auto updates turned on with solid security and just let it be keeping everything updated in development. We're going to turn that off at this point because we want to manually run updates on the live site. And I'm going to make sure that we have the setting in solid security my favorite setting in the world which is\r\n\r\noh it's not active. Well nuts\r\n\r\nthe the version management setting where it says update if vulnerability exists so that security this ought to be in your base site. Do not want to go through this.\r\n\r\nOkay, well I'm just gonna ignore that. But you know what I'm talking about right under version management at the very bottom, auto update. It fixes vulnerability. Make sure that's on because that is the best setting in solid security. I want to go ahead and change my user's password on the site. Save that someplace, update the salts. Now this is something to do step by step, okay. And I put these two together for a reason. Because here's what you'll do. You go in you will update your password. You'll save it right at that moment. Go in and update your salts because that's going to log you out. And now you can paste in your password. And when you log in your password manager should prompt you to save the new password. Isn't that cool? But do it that way makes it makes things work a lot better. And you absolutely want to update your salts. Otherwise, all of your sites built out of the base site will have the same salts and that's just bad. So you can update your salts from within solid security. You can just search at the top there for salts and it'll give you the right spot. Click the button you're good to go. While you're in solid security, go ahead and set up your CAPTCHA with whatever CAPTCHA option that you're using. I like Cloudflare turnstyle, pick your poison, and then I'm going to deactivate solid security before I migrate.\r\n\r\nEvery now and then in weird situations. We've had solid security get in the way of a migration or something wasn't quite right. And so we've just started deactivate solid security and then once we launched, we reactivate it and it just is smoother that way.\r\n\r\nAll right at this point, if we've not already created a Google Analytics for property for the site, or if it's brand new and doesn't have one, we'll go ahead and create that property. Now. Create a Tag Manager property if that's what you're using.\r\n\r\nAdd the codes or the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics to Kadence. Now remember, one of the things we did in our base site is we created a Kadence element. Remember this one called Analytics code. And this is an HTML it's a code block, and we would paste here\r\n\r\nour code and this should already be set based on the settings in your base site, the show up in the header on the entire site for logged out users. And this is just a great way to do this. Like if I'm logged in, I don't want to tracking me. It's a great way to rule out the tracking of any logged in users, you your client, whatever now, if this is a site where it's a membership site, or an E commerce site, where actual customers are logging in, then you're going to want this to be all users, obviously, but it's at this point in our pre launch that we're going to go ahead and paste in the analytics code into this element. And it works quite well.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna go and turn on Yoast and run the Yoast wizard. Make sure all that stuff or your SEO plugin of choice. Make sure in Yoast, this is a big deal. Make sure in Yoast\r\n\r\na couple of things well first of all, a couple things I am\r\n\r\nI have too many windows open and I need to turn off my dashboard because I want to show you this am metal boxes\r\n\r\nOkay, so probably you've noticed if you're a Yoast user, how it's dropping in this winter integration and stuff, okay. So some of this is going to be settings that you'll want in your base site. But here under Yoast, we're going to go down to integrations. This is not in the checklist. This is a base site setting to turn off sem rush and winter. That gets rid of those stupid meta boxes.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nBilly, would it not be better to run Yoast after migration? No, doesn't matter.\r\n\r\nI want all this stuff set before I want I pushed the site over in the primary reason here. Let's look in search appearance.\r\n\r\nSettings. Oh, you know what? They didn't update. This is okay. This should be setting sorry. Oh, they updated this whole interface. So really here under Content Types, categories. I want to make sure that like Kadence elements. I don't want that showing in the sitemap. No Kadence elements should show up on its own right to turn that off. This is probably a setting for your base site because you're not ever going to want people to find your elements in the sitemap and so just go through each of these content types and make sure do you want put like if you have custom post types, maybe you want those to show up? Maybe you don't just make sure everything's set up correctly. Same down here for all your taxonomies on the site, like product categories I probably want but do I want WooCommerce Shipping Classes showing up in my sitemap Nope.\r\n\r\nTags? Yeah, probably. So.\r\n\r\nYeah. So go through those settings and make sure that only what you want to show up on the on the sitemap is what is actually showing up at this point, I'm also going to make sure that my default Facebook Share is correct. And I bet these links are wrong as well.\r\n\r\nI've neglected to update this for the new Yoast UI.\r\n\r\nLet's see where did they put that maybe a nurse settings danced\r\n\r\nAlright, does anybody remember offhand where they moved that? I don't spend a bunch of time looking.\r\n\r\nLike it's this\r\n\r\nis also I could turn author archives off for most sites.\r\n\r\nJust a good thing.\r\n\r\nMedia pages Oh, oh god it.\r\n\r\nI can't remember. There's a setting in here where you can pick your Facebook default. Share. And I can't remember where that is. But it is there somewhere.\r\n\r\nMake sure your crack image shares so once you this is a great tool if you're not aware of this, the Facebook debugger link it is in your guide. And we can\r\n\r\nthis actually goes out and scrapes the open graph data. And it shows what how this is actually going to look on the web. So go through and make sure that the key pages of the site look good when they're shared. Maybe a couple of posts, just verify. Also I'm going to use an external website like broken link check. I know this design of the site looks like it's gonna party like it's 1999 but that's okay.\r\n\r\nThe broken link check I know that there's WordPress plugins that do this. I would rather something from outside of WordPress scan through WordPress and let me know what's going on. So the if you Nathan duck um we got to type in our squiggly code\r\n\r\nand I want to report all occurrences in that see I hate squiggly codes in x\r\n\r\nokay, so it takes a minute but it's actually now crawling through the site. I would rather have an external report of a broken link like this. Just to verify make sure there's no broken links in the site before you launch.\r\n\r\nAlright, while this is doing its thing, we move on to the management section. At this point, I'm going to set up postmark for the new domain. And we have a whole separate process for that. I'm going to add my domain details to wherever you're tracking that stuff in your world. Who's the registrar what the DNS where it's hosted.\r\n\r\nAnd all that and then add the client to whatever email marketing software you use that you can reach out to all your clients and clay in case there's an issue. MailChimp list for us. We'll just drop them on that list. Hey, no broken links so that is good.\r\n\r\nAlright, so we're down to our cleanup phase. So I'm gonna make sure to switch to my editor user and make sure everything looks good with menu items, hidden and meta boxes and all of that. I'm gonna go through and remove all unused themes and plugins. So if I had any leftover development plugins like that WP multi page creator plugin that we use to create all the pages, make sure those are deactivated and removed at this point. I'm also going to check my number of revisions. Make sure those are set right. Gravity Forms. Oh, this is a this is a big one.\r\n\r\nGravity Forms as you probably know, tracks annual analytics, very simple analytics on its forms. Like Oh, this one's been viewed one time. Well during development that's probably picked up some things. So what I'll do is all the boxes, reset views, apply them also, if I've done any test entries. To test the form, you can permanently delete entries for those forms. I'll just go through and clear all that out prior to launch. Right now. I'm also going to delete the private site plugin that keeps our that kept our site private. I'm going to go through this is something I've added recently just it makes the world better. I'm gonna go through and do the backup solid backups diagnostic tools here and force cancel and daily housekeeping.\r\n\r\nJust to clean everything up.\r\n\r\nDiagnostics page does take a minute to load as it's looking at lots of different things. Here it goes. So we go to troubleshooting. And at this point, I would run force cancel just in case there happens to be a backup running right now. Let's just stop that and then we're going to clean up so both of those things. This takes about 15 seconds ish\r\n\r\nJeopardy theme, insert Jeopardy theme\r\n\r\nOkay, and then clean up all the old data just like that. That just wipes everything clean, you're ready to go.\r\n\r\nBecause next step is to go through and create the full backup for migration. So still doing they're gonna spoon clean out all the garbage. Alright, so we're totally clean, ready to go. We create our full backup. It's a relaunch. Do not forget to do this. If you're relaunching a site, if you're able to go in and back up the current site, save it in archive.\r\n\r\nDo it. I have original sites from four or five years ago in our Dropbox archive, I just want him there for just you never know. You never know when you might need something there. So go ahead and backup that existing site if you're able sometimes you don't have that access, etc. But yeah.\r\n\r\nAnd before you migrate the site go to that old horrible, terrible site that you just rebuilt with a brand new beautiful site and go take screenshots of all the pages of the old ugly site or the primary pages. So that later when you get time to do this, I know how it goes. You can create a before and after on your website, maybe a case study but if you don't have the before pictures, you won't be able to do that. So at least just go take the pictures and at some point hopefully you'll get around to doing that. But and you can show the before and after it's a good thing.\r\n\r\nAll right. So at this point we are done with our pre launch list. That's a lot. It does take some time. pausing briefly. Any questions about this? I feed it yes, there's always the wayback, machine@archive.org but a lot of times the images aren't available for you.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, in many cases, the images aren't available. So it's way better just to do this.\r\n\r\nAt you know, and there's Chrome extensions to do full screen captures and all that. So yeah. All right. No more questions. Then let's up somebody dropped in the q&a. Gene, do you request a testimonial? You can and I used to put that on my launch checklist, but I never did it at launch. So I took it off of there. So maybe on your checklist, it would be scheduled appointment three days from now to get a testimonial from the client because usually at this point, I'm just trying to get the site out the door right.\r\n\r\nOr it could be in an email sequence you send to the client after the payments received and whatever. It could be in the onboarding email, you send them a hey, now we're moving you in our support. And here's how you request support. And by the way, give us a testimonial. Here's a Google link or whatever. Yeah. Sherry, do you ever go back into archive Site Backups and reactivate them for a portfolio?\r\n\r\nYeah, so I backup a site? Because who knows? If something like maybe there was a form entry there that they never got and they need it and whatever. Just backup the site. It's you know, just back it up for screenshots. I take the screenshots right here before launch.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie, moving down the list, solid backups. So we're going to run through the solid backups migration process, import, buddy restore, boom done.\r\n\r\nAnd somebody mentioned earlier about that the checkbox that people forget.\r\n\r\nSettings and reading.\r\n\r\nsearch engine visibility, this one right here. The one that's like the most hidden? It is, it is the WordPress site that is the most hidden and most important all at the same time.\r\n\r\nYeah, if you check that box is checked, Google's not going to it's not going to index your site. Because that check mark says no index at the top of every page but at the end of the solid backups migration process, there's the spot where it says uncheck the hide from search engines box. So you can do this as part it doesn't have to be a separate step. In other words, just do this as part of the migration.\r\n\r\nAlright, so immediately, immediately after the site migrates, go clear all of the caches, because who knows, like things get messed up weird things happen with migrations and caches. So clear the Page Builder clack, the Page Builder cache, if your whatever website optimizing tool you're running for us, it's Lightspeed through the Lightspeed cache. Also go out there clear the Cloudflare cache.\r\n\r\nLightspeed fortunately has a Cloudflare API integration, where it clears it all at once, but just make sure whatever however many layers of caching you have happening, clear all of them and it's a good practice just to go ahead and refresh your permalinks.\r\n\r\nBecause sometimes, and maybe you've seen this and I've never been able to figure out exactly why this happens. But sometimes, when you restore a site, you go to in the home page loads just fine. But you go to any of the other sites and you get a page not found, and that's a permalink issue. So go in there, right as you launch clear, the caches reset permalinks and by reset permalinks I mean, go settings. Permalinks. Switch this quickly to plain save it.\r\n\r\nThen go back to post name and save it and you're done. That refreshes your permalinks takes like 10 seconds and you're done. This is a step. Oh my goodness. Don't Don't forget this step. Okay. Make sure that all of the ways people might access your domain have been tested. So both the HTTPS version and the HTTP version of with www and without www check manually, all four of those things in an incognito browser. Because that's going to real quick let you know up there's something going on here where it's not redirecting to HTTPS or it's not working right with the www or vice versa or whatever. So check them all to reveal any issues that have popped up.\r\n\r\nUsually, these are DNS issues that are causing that. Okay, that's the launch checklist.\r\n\r\nOkay, next up is once we're done the post launch checklist. So we're gonna go right in immediately reactivate solid security, make sure that SSL is forced on the front and the back end. And then we're gonna go into file permissions. And make sure and again, this is a cpanel environment. It's probably similar in most others, unless you're in the nginx environment. Make sure your htaccess and your WP config are set to 444. Now the way you test that you go to I'm not gonna be able to get there because I'm just going to run real quick through this wizard. Which is not my favorite\r\n\r\nby the way, I am I have talked to Timothy recently about having a skip this. Put into the wizard for the or expert mode for those of us that know what we're doing\r\n\r\nbecause this step, there's a nice little visual inside of solid security that shows this to you.\r\n\r\nOkay, um, settings.\r\n\r\nAll right, so I want it is under maintenance, no permissions\r\n\r\nPROTECT system files\r\n\r\nnope, that's not it. Let's see.\r\n\r\nWell, where did it go?\r\n\r\nI wonder if this got removed?\r\n\r\nYes, recent.\r\n\r\nPerhaps it did.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're not testing for that installed security anymore. It's still a good practice to go in and change your permissions to 444 that means no access. Even at that point, if a hacker gets in and gets writing access, as the WordPress user somehow they won't be able to change your IP config and your htaccess. So this is just a good practice. At this point, we're going to go through and relicense all of our themes and plugins that require it that have domain based licensing so we'll go through edit the checklist, add any plugins that you have that have domain based licenses, many do not. They just want the key, some do and you'll have to put those in at this point.\r\n\r\nSEO we're going to test the SEO sitemap. So it's always your domain slash sitemap underscore index dot HTML\r\n\r\nindex dot XML. So there's our yo sitemap just take a look at that. Make sure that you know it looks right. Everything is there's nothing showing up that shouldn't be that everything that should show up is showing up. If for some reason this 404 is it's because you forgot to reset permalinks earlier. I've had that happen. Now we're going to take this URL while it's up. At this point, we go over to Google Search Console, set up the property and validate it add the link to the sitemap in there. We're also going to add our site add to create a property in Bing Webmaster Tools, which will connect to Google Webmaster Tools, by the way, or Google Search Console.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll import this new site you just created in Google Search Console. Which is super cool. You can add the add the sitemap there as well. We're also going to activate the index now plugin, which will preemptively let Bing and other index now aware search engines know when you have added new content. Google doesn't support this yet.\r\n\r\nAt this point, we're gonna go back through our plugin list one more time, just make sure there are no unneeded plugins or themes and delete anything that's there.\r\n\r\nNow we're going to set it up in our management system, add it to solid Central, and set up reporting as needed. We're going to go in and tweak our solid backup settings. Now, you may remember in the Starter Site course what I recommended. We didn't set them up here. So I recommended setting up three backup schedules in your base site to our dev backups. There's there would well let's just do it.\r\n\r\nWe'll say this is our daily development full twice a day backup daily and that's unable to run. We've got that schedule set up we'll also in dev have a database backup once an hour. I can't tell you how many times this has saved my backside because you can just roll right back.\r\n\r\nOh, what does happen?\r\n\r\ndatabanks only once hourly. Oh, interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, and then I'll also add in the back this should be in the base site. We're going to add our daily backup. This is what it's going to be on the live site.\r\n\r\nBut I don't want this one enabled. So this is how it should look in your base site with\r\n\r\nso weird I wonder why that just happened.\r\n\r\nIt's the current time that is so interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we have our two enabled development backups and our disable but it's already set up and I would also have this already connected to the remote destination, if we're using it. So it's just all set up and ready to go. Now at this point of the launch process, we can go through here and delete these two because we don't need our dev backups anymore. And we then turn on our regular daily backup.\r\n\r\nSo we don't have to create it. It's already there in the base site. We get rid of our dev backups, we turn on our standard management type backup, and we're going to just double check our remote destination and make sure that everything's set especially the destination folder where it's going. Double check our settings just to make sure everything's right. Go ahead and create a full backup of the site now, send it over to the remote destination, verify that it appears and then I also download that thought that backup file and then save that in the archive. So most of our client sites since we've been running this launch checklist, there's a domain in the remote destination. There's like a launched or an old it's usually called Old and then the date. That was the original site. If we replaced it and that backups in there. Then there's a launched and then the date. And that's the this first backup after we launch I pull up into that launch folder that way I've got the site the way it was when we launched it. That makes sense.\r\n\r\nSo run through one final speed optimization just see if there's anything weird that's going on here and tweak anything that you might need to just one more final once over with the speed optimizations. And then our final task, go ahead and now that it's running and everything's right over on our live server, we can go clean up the development server, whatever's over there, delete the subdomain, the back the databases and so forth. We can delete if you if you built locally, you can delete all that if you want. Or you can just wait a few days if you want to. But you had the backups that's the thing. Pretty safe to go and delete things. When a post launch call with the client go and get that on the schedule and then take screenshots of your new website. So that is a pretty comprehensive launch process that I would encourage you to take and make your own. Put your own details into it and run it several times and see how it works for you.\r\n\r\nAll right, we actually finished a little bit early today. I got plenty of time for questions.\r\n\r\nWho has questions or comments about this or anything we've talked about during this optimizing your starter site.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, this is a good list. It's taken years to refine this. And it's likely that you'll refine it some more on your own.\r\n\r\nBut hopefully this saves you a little time\r\n\r\nYeah, so we talked about a little bit earlier. Sherry getting testimonials. So I would maybe have a I wouldn't put it that part of my website launch checklist. Maybe I would probably have something else, you know, follow up actions.\r\n\r\nIn my thought, I want to run this checklist and be done with it on launch day. Right so at the most I would look at the most I have this item down here when a post launch call with the client.\r\n\r\nRight? But like this is a list that when the site's launched on launch day, I want this done. I want all the boxes checked. Done. I don't want anything hanging around like for me to get a testimonial that depends on the client and he knows when they're ever going to respond to that and so forth.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nOther questions or comments about this that yeah, Debra? Thank you. That's great.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, we still have 20 minutes.\r\n\r\nI guess we can all get some work done.\r\n\r\nAnyway, this is it. Last Chance, of course. I mean, it's office hours tomorrow. So as always, you can come on and ask whatever you want about any of this. And that might be the case as you take some of this and start looking through it. You may discover that you have some additional questions. And of course, that's what office hours are for every Thursday. And that, by the way is not changing into the new year. We'll continue on our current schedule for office hours, which is most Thursdays. We will be on Thursday throughout by the way, the holidays. So this third tomorrow, the 21st and then the 28th. We'll also have office hours as usual. One thing I will mention, let's just pull up the calendar\r\n\r\nAll right, so we're a little skinny in January. I'm still working on some of that.\r\n\r\nWe will have no let me go back to December. No live streams.\r\n\r\nThe week of Christmas here so no live streams here and no live streams here either. So that's just kind of been our habit as we get through the holidays. We won't have live streams other than office hours.\r\n\r\nBut we do have several things scheduled for January. I'm still honestly I'm working on a premium event for January and I can't decide what that is. And I will actually appreciate some input on that during tomorrow's office hours.\r\n\r\nOh Jean that the settings are in tool.\r\n\r\nI knew they were there somewhere.\r\n\r\nAnd then I just seen them. Right here. Check file permissions. Look at that. Thank you Jean.\r\n\r\nRight. Okay, so this will tell you what the current value of permissions are and what they should be. So my root directory is at 755 in order to be at 750 and then these two are also wrong and you can change these by going into File Manager.\r\n\r\nActually, if we\r\n\r\nlet's just do the P config. That P config ought to be 444.\r\n\r\nSo here we are in our development site. We just do right and file permissions and make it for what's\r\n\r\nor, or just like that.\r\n\r\nAnd change permissions and you can actually see it right here.\r\n\r\nAnd if we run this again though, P config should turn green.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nThat lets you see\r\n\r\ncam How does iThemes Training different from solid Academy? Ah, it's this it's renamed.\r\n\r\nWe are Kim you're only chatting with me versus everyone if you want everybody to see your question. So Solid Academy is rebranded I iThemes Training.\r\n\r\nIt is virtually the same.\r\n\r\nhammy why don't we get API keys for Kadence? I have no idea. They, if you well, because it's a different licensing system for each of those. So Kadence has its own licensing system where you buy and they give you API keys, but you bought on the I think side and so you have to use your I think membership. It's just they're two separate systems.\r\n\r\nYeah, okay. Yeah. See, I'll take a look. We'll look at that tomorrow. You're having some issues with Kadence licensing. I don't know how much help I'm going to be but we'll certainly take a look at it.\r\n\r\nBilly, what has changed\r\n\r\nOh class have you did you get Kadence licensed license keys for Kadence No, that's always been that way Billy.\r\n\r\nYeah, it's always been toolkit members. Log in with unless I could be misunderstanding you Billy. But it's always been right here where you can license it you click here and then you log in with your themes username and password\r\n\r\nBilly you're saying you log in with I think security log it What's your I thought it was it would be your I iThemes login, which would also be used for I think security.\r\n\r\nBest you can email me at Nathan at solid wp.com\r\n\r\nOh, and by the way we do there is a survey that I created that I would really let me give you that link because I know there's some folks here that I don't believe completed that survey. Just about ideas for premium events in 2024. Here is that survey if you would just if you have not done this survey yet. I would really appreciate it it won't take you long. Like literally here's just a list in bath you can use this to this might even be easier to send.\r\n\r\nKeep everything in one spot. I've done a bunch of potential topics here. At this link. I just dropped in the chat and there's also a box here for you to type in ideas. But yeah, check all the ones you're interested in, check all of them that you're interested in. And I'm using this kind of a way out what we're going to spend time on next year.\r\n\r\nOkay, so class is saying solid support will get you license keys for Kadence pro if your legacy right.\r\n\r\nApparently class has done that. Go talk to support a betcha they'll work it out for you.\r\n\r\nYeah, yes. So Stacy if you fill it out already, and you have an idea.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely just drop it in here. I have like some analytics going on with these where it's tracking how many people voted so don't revote for these checkboxes. But if you have an idea, just type it in here and submit please that I would really appreciate that\r\n\r\nall right. Anybody else before we wrap up?\r\n\r\nYeah, so class has gone through the process of getting API keys. I didn't know how that worked. That's one of the kinds of things that I'm not in the loop on as a contractor a lot of those internal things I just don't know. So that's good. And that might be actually advantageous. To you. If you are a legacy toolkit holder, to go ahead and have the API keys.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie.\r\n\r\nWell, I believe that's going to wrap it up for us today. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last couple of days hopefully you've got some fun checklists to make your life easier. That's the goal of the Starter Site in general is just to make everything easier and more streamlined and more efficient and all those things. Alright, I'll see you back here tomorrow for office hours. 1pm Central here on solid Academy, where we go further together.","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:951:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:7:\"Day One\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:232:\"\r\n\r\n\r\nHour One:Starter Site Spin-UpProcess\r\nHour Two:Speed Optimizations and Dealing with Web Core Vitals\r\n\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"896340402\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QPYiWyzhrWyuykljt2cY8y5bN9vox5rE\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1Nu9hmLUXl31yrzDMI2SIbrXxnzVu33PJ\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/I2QPeCEk42SJNLuhX0jC4KWiyR4?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:819:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:7:\"Day Two\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:100:\"Hour One: Preparing a Site for the Client\r\nHour Two:Website Launch Process\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"896689056\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QPYiWyzhrWyuykljt2cY8y5bN9vox5rE\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1mtXDluaO1-VPbjYl0urojCYRwtFZmOsm\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/NBWaWDkTsA2iEueo_3fj86KxhXc?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448454,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nTake Your Starter Site to the Next Level\n\n\n\nLast month, we focused on creating a starter site that you can replicate and use as a starting point for all future website development. This helpful tool allows you to eliminate the repeated work you do each time you build a website for a client.\n\n\n\nThis month, we will surround our starter site with processes and checklists to significantly improve the way we implement it for future projects.\n\n\n\nDay One Agenda: Starter Site Spin-up Process, Speed Optimizations (Dealing with Web Core Vitals)Day Two Agenda: Preparing a Site for the Client, Website Launch Process\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"All right course handbook is there in the chat if you're just joining us in zoom, open that up say howdy.\r\n\r\nElsewhere you're logging in from today.\r\n\r\ncaptions should be up and going for everybody now\r\n\r\nmany things in the course handbook\r\n\r\nYeah, Christine, make sure you you have disconnected that old things calendar it's not going to help you anymore\r\n\r\nAll right. It's optimizing your starter site.\r\n\r\nI have lost\r\n\r\nmy camera.\r\n\r\nHere it is.\r\n\r\nSo, good news, at least for me is I have now figured out how to turn off the gesture control on my camera so no cheap humor now for anybody.\r\n\r\nIt's sue me.\r\n\r\nAm I too loud for you sue. Sorry about that. Or too low\r\n\r\nAll right. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. I'm going to drop in the link bundle for today. I'm louder than most other webinars while they need to speak up. Good grief.\r\n\r\nOh, did I not do the right.\r\n\r\nOh, you're right. Look at that. Okay, I'm going to fix that really quick. I wonder why it says that.\r\n\r\nLet's fix that. It sure does. Interesting.\r\n\r\nWell, clearly, I made a typo. I know that's hard for any of you to believe.\r\n\r\nAlright, I've now updated.\r\n\r\nYeah, the title of the name there. Hopefully it'll get updated reasonably quickly.\r\n\r\nOh, that's weird.\r\n\r\nOkay, not updated. Okay. It's fixed.\r\n\r\nYeah, the link is correct. I think the file name on Google Drive was not correct. But I did just update that. I don't know how it could have gotten 2022 When I had 2023 in the PDF title. That's weird.\r\n\r\nvalid under 18 Weird things that have happened today. Hope you're all doing well. We're about a minute to go before we get started. You're just joining us in zoom links are in the chat.\r\n\r\nGood links are in the chat ready to go handbook and course replay. We got a long way to go over the next couple of days. It's gonna be a fun course. Yeah, can it's the internet ghosts. Yeah.\r\n\r\nThat's it. We're gonna go with that.\r\n\r\nMaybe it's time for me to wash my microphone windscreen here again.\r\n\r\nIt's the it's Mercury in Retrograde. I don't know what to think about all that.\r\n\r\nAh, yes. So yeah, I wish that Zoom had a way for me to pin like the links but alas.\r\n\r\nIt does not. So if you come on after I post things in the chat. It's not there. So I'll just keep posting things in the chat.\r\n\r\nOh, Stacy, that's nice of you.\r\n\r\nHopefully it'll be a good decision and worth your while. I think there's some good stuff here. Hey, Phoebe.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to go. Okay, I got three after so let us officially start this thing.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon, everybody. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to optimizing your starter site for 2023. This is our December premium event here on the solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host at solid Academy and also your instructor for this little course where we are taking the starter site that we built last month in the November 2023 premium course. And we're going to optimize it and surround it with some systems and processes and how do we use this and become efficient. So there we go. Let me take a quick poll unscientific, though it may be in the chat. How many of you have built your starter site after last month, or you tweaked your existing site?\r\n\r\nAnybody done that already?\r\n\r\nIt's a good time every year to rebuild a Starter Site.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right.\r\n\r\nA lot of folks have done that. 75% says Liz. Yeah, good. Okay. So this can still be helpful to you even if you did not see last month course, they are best taken together. But there's still a lot in here that could benefit you if you're using Kadence. First of all, and if you have a Starter Site, so let's talk about where we're headed over the next couple of days. Now again, if you're just joining us, the links are in the chat for this 29 Page course handbook as well as the replay, which will be up about an hour after we finished today. Maybe a bit longer today because it's things going on but it will be up soon before this evening for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we have a lot to talk about over the next couple of days. Our goals in this course, are to create consistent processes for preparing and launching websites. So last month, we talked about building the starter site that will be the base for all of our future development and we did things like getting all of our plugins install our plugin stack is there we've licensed as much as we can we've maybe created a basic contact forms, we never have to do that. Again. We have you know, set all the settings like we like them for the goal is to remove as much repetitive work as possible because it doesn't really help do that repetitive work. It just takes time. So the more that we can save and do it once and then replicate that for the future, the better. So we're going to take that base site that we found and we're going to surround it with consistent processes and process checklists that make it easier to deploy. So once you've got the thing, building the thing was last month, now we're going to work out ways to become even more efficient using the thing that we've built. We're also going to spend a little bit of time on speed optimization, as we usually do in this course because it's just helpful and it's an ongoing battle for speed and WordPress. So why is this course important? Our same three big ideas from last month efficiency, proficiency and confidence, efficiency by removing as many of these repetitive tasks as we possibly can, that should reduce the overall time that it takes us to deploy client projects. Also proficiency when we're using the same tool set and the same checklists and processes. Every time we build a client site. We get better at it. And so again, our time goes down and as we tweak our checklist we get better and better. And then that results in this soft result called Confidence. It's like it's not something you might expect. By building up these processes you might expect become more efficient. You could certainly expect to become more proficient. but confidence is one of these things that happens by the way, as long as you're doing these things. So as you systematize your systems and processes and you start getting better at the things that you do. It has this effect mentally of changing how you view yourself. This can actually be a great solution to impostor syndrome are one of the solutions because when you realize hey, I've got this thing and it works and I can build things and you know, I'm really good at this and I've got great processes and systems to build and deploy. It changes the way you think about yourself. It can change the way you think about your pricing. It has an overall great impact that you might not expect. So here's where we're headed over the next two days. Today, we're going to look at the spin up process for deploying this Starter Site for every client project that'll take up most of the first hour. Then we'll be looking at speed optimizations and Webcore vitals in the second hour today. Now tomorrow, we'll be preparing the site for the client and the things that go involved in that. And then we'll walk through a website launch process. So it'll take about four hours one hour for each of these topics. And of course we'll have time for questions along the way. You can use use the chat for that or actually, let me yeah, you can use the chat for that. I don't think we're going to be rushed for time. So you can use q&a If you want, but just drop it in the chat. I'll try to get those questions in context as we're going. I think we can make that work.\r\n\r\nAll right. So everybody excited everybody ready to go.\r\n\r\nWe've got our Starter Site, and now we're going to deploy it for each client project. Okay, so there's a series of steps that I've given you below in a logical order and by logical i mean it makes sense to me so it might not make sense to you. But you know, follow my thought process and make this your own. This is the way I do it. And, you know, I think it's a good start at least for making it the way you want to do it. It assumes that you have a basic design in mind with colors and logo and other assets. It assumes you have a basic content structure in mind. So just just way the actual spin up of the development site in our world, in my agency world usually doesn't happen until the development stage, depending if we're doing our design mock up actually in browser, it might occur prior to right as we're starting design phase. It depends on how we're getting design approval from the client. But the very first step in our process in my agency is content content first. So we're thinking about content architecture, and content definition, what needs to be on the site, what needs to be created, what's already there, what the media looks like, and getting all of that in place. So we're assuming as we move into this checklist that that stuff is already done.\r\n\r\nAnd again, these are suggestions based on my workflow, you'll want to modify it to you know, to match your process and your needs. And of course, I'm not saying by any stretch that this process is perfect. It works pretty well for me, but I still we still in the agency, we are iterating on processes. We're tweaking and changing checklist moving things around. Every now and then because we find a better way to do things. So processes and checklists are living documents that grow and expand with you as your knowledge expands. So you'll want to modify this as you find more efficient ways of deploying your starter site. Also, just be aware in these processes. Still, we're still finding things that we're adding to our base site. So if through the process of deploying a Starter Site, you realize I'm doing this every time. Well, why not just put that in your starter site to begin with? So for example, one of the things that we often do in the mobile menu of virtually every single site that we build, there's two things in the mobile menu that are not well three things that are always there, obviously, the menu items that's kind of a given, but we like to put the client logo above the menu and whatever the primary call to action button for the site is below the menu. So it's logo site, you know, menu items, and then the call to action button. So for whatever reason, I had never put those in the Starter Site, but I've changed that now. So in the Starter Site, there's going to be the we're actually going to rebuild our Starter Site. Next few weeks probably, there'll be the logo at the top, the menu and the call to action because I'm adding that to every site now on the current Starter Site. So as you discover these things that you're doing every time just take an extra minute and stick that in your starter site. You don't have to worry about it again. Right.\r\n\r\nOkay, does that make sense? Everybody with me so far? None of this is perfect. It's a jumping off place, make it your own and then continually improve it.\r\n\r\nBetter. Ben is asking is it a good idea to place the Starter Site on a domain classed as Dev? As some plugins do not require a you certainly could. It depends on where you like to develop. We do have a dot dev domain that we use for Yes, site development, and we spin things off in subdomains as we're building. Yeah.\r\n\r\nSo some plugins are aware of a dot dev domain and don't worry about the licensing. We just don't usually worry about that. We'll build with whatever current version we're on and good to go.\r\n\r\nMatt, actually, I can't think of any plugins we use in the base stack that are that are dot dev domain aware, but surely you could not dev domains are fairly cheap.\r\n\r\nAll right. So let's get into this process.\r\n\r\nWe're going to start off by duplicating our Starter Site. Now, wherever that lives for you, is how you're going to duplicate it right. So a great way to do this is with solid backups. You can simply backup and migrate from your starter site to a new in our world Billy's asking is it a subdomain or a new domain? So we have a, a, our base site lives in a subdomain and we replicate it to a new subdomain.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, and there's a bunch of other tools, right, but we like solid backups. It's great. We use it for everything. So set up your build environment, subdomain localhost, whatever, and then create a database and user restore your backup over there relicense themes and plugins as needed that require it for that new domain. If you are in a cpanel environment, the WordPress toolkit if you've not seen that before, WordPress toolkit is super cool. And you can actually just with a click clone the site there at the cPanel level, it creates a database that does all those things automatically, and it's done in like a minute or two. So it saves a lot of process, a lot of steps. And we're using that for a lot of sites now. Pretty cool.\r\n\r\nOkay, so once we get started I'm gonna we're gonna dive back into our actual Starter Site that we started last month here. Once you get the new site up and going, everything's working, we're gonna move into our Kadence options. This is where I start. Now again, this is my workflow that I've sort of figured out is the best way for me if you want to move things around great, but there's usually a reason that everything I have here is in the order that it is. So we're going to first start with our Kadence options. And if you're using a different theme, substitute your theme options here. So we're gonna go to appearance and Kadence and there's all these things we can toggle on. So I usually toggle on header add ons, Header, Footer Scripts, and hooked elements. And again, these are things it's here because it's in the Starter Site, right.\r\n\r\nAnd if that's what you usually toggle on, put that in your starter site so you don't have to worry about this. Are there any other elements here? Like do I is this site going to have an ultimate menu, maybe toggle it on right? So anyway, do all your settings in your theme right here at this point?\r\n\r\nThen we're going to move forward and start to create our page structure and menus. So what I use for this and I gave you this plugin in the stack, it's not well let me let me activate it and I'll show you it's this WP create multiple posts and pages. There's a bunch of plugins that do this. I kind of liked this one the best. It works, and it lets you just make a list and it creates all those pages at once. It's faster than page add new page publish page, add new page publish speakers in that. However, this is not a plugin that I would leave active on the site, even after this point because it does some weird things like it goofs up the Media Library in ListView. Like I don't know why it does this, that this plugin that's doing this, it's just ridiculous. But anyway, at this point, you know, let's say this is an attorney's website. We're gonna want like practice areas and then bankruptcy law\r\n\r\ndivorce\r\n\r\nI can spell Business Law cetera we're gonna want a the primary call to action page will be schedule a consultation.\r\n\r\nAnyway, just list out all the pages that you're going to want to create on the site one after the other, change our post type to page, we want it to be status published with post author Nathan. So this doesn't create child relationships.\r\n\r\nSo you'll do that in just a minute. So we're going to just add these posts for example. Now we go over here to pages, and we can say that\r\n\r\nthat's here. Get rid of that. So bankruptcy law, business law, divorce are both your bulk edit and make those under practice areas. So that's how I do this is create all the pages at once real quick and then go establishing the parent child relationships here with a quick edit, and that'll get all those setup.\r\n\r\nSo once we get our page structure set up, let's see we're not going to have services in this site. Do we have a contact page? Yes. About contacts, the practice areas news. Okay, that's pretty good schedule consultation. So now we're going to build out our menus. Now, I usually have\r\n\r\nas this I wish there was a way to like bulk remove pages that don't exist.\r\n\r\nAll right, so we've got our main menu here. So we'll want to drag these new things that we created over there. Let's see about it's really just going to be that the practice areas. We'll pull this over. Because this menu we set up as part of our base site. So create the menu based on what the typical pages are on your site, so that there's as few things to remove and add later.\r\n\r\nSo now we've got this set up, we have our basic menu. I also in my base site, there's a mobile menu that I create\r\n\r\nthat is going to be\r\n\r\nwell, I'll I'll use a mobile menu if in a lot of cases, this depends on the site, a separate mobile menu, we're gonna go ahead and set it up here. I do like to put the home link on the mobile menu. Whereas on the main primary menu of the website, I don't put a home link.\r\n\r\nI think it just takes up space and people know to click the logo these days. It's up to you. I usually do not put a home menu but I'm also going in I would I have this in my base site. I'm also going to set up a like some footer menus as well.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Create new menu we'll call this footer menu.\r\n\r\nfooter menu one and that's going to be home. You all home news about contact.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAnd then determine you to I'll show you why in just a minute.\r\n\r\nThat that's going to be our schedule area our practice areas\r\n\r\nAlright, so now we have all our menu setup.\r\n\r\nYeah, see the chatter in the chat about moving home menu. I mean, you know, look at most websites that have been designed in the last five years and they do not have a home menu.\r\n\r\nIt's just it takes up space doesn't hurt anything but it just takes up space and it kind of makes it look old school.\r\n\r\nSo if the client insists on it, add it anyway. Okay, now we're gonna move into the customizer and go colors, buttons and typography. So let's see, customize.\r\n\r\nRemoving the home menu is especially important if you have a really long menu and it starts you know, at some point you start to run out of real estate for the length of that menu. And so home is absolutely the first thing to drop.\r\n\r\nOkay, so at this point we go in and we're going to customize our, our color palette. So going in here to colors and then you know dealing with button colors, fonts and typography and anything that you're going to do we assume at this point, again, the design has already worked out. So we've got font choices, we're gonna go drop all that stuff into the Kadence customizer. Now, I've also have included here just for your reference, this was also in last month's course, this cheat sheet to the Kadence color palette in the article about that so if you want that it's there. If you're using Beaver Builder, you may want to consider the central color palette plugin because you can actually set your palette there in in the central color palette, and you'll still have to set it in the Kadence customizing Customizer Settings but central color palette you can have it push that palette into Beaver Builder that's really helpful you can also by the way force a particular color palette into beaver into beaver builder with this code I just gave you the link to the Beaver Builder doc so if you're a beaver builder person take a look at that. It's kind of cool.\r\n\r\nAll right. I've also re added to this guy this was also in last month's guide, the bit my basic Kadence typography settings and it's just here so starting out with 18 pixel base font weight at 1.75 line height. That's that's the first step and whatever font you've chosen, take a look at it for body text and make sure that it's not too big or too small. The The X Factor in font sizing is the x height. So if you look at some different fonts, like Montserrat versus EB Garamond, you'll notice that the related like in Eb Garamond for example, the capital letters are this tall and the lower letters are this tall. In Montserrat the capitals are this tall and the lower lowercase letters are just a little bit smaller. That has the effect of making the font look bigger on the screen. So you'll just want to you may have to tweak this 18 pixel setting up or down depending on the font that you've chosen for the website. So just visually verify it looks good. Here's that chart I gave you last month of heading sizes at different settings. And again tweak this make it your own. I find the settings work pretty well. And always 1.25 for the line height headings and line height settings in headings. Don't you hate it when you go to a site and like the headings are spaced really far apart? It just makes things hard to read. Those ought to be tightened up a little bit.\r\n\r\nAll right. So once you have all the typography settings in we're going to jump in and customize our header and footer. I'm going to go ahead and deactivate this multiple page plug in, because I hate what it does to the Media Library.\r\n\r\nLet's see Christine can line height be determined in the chart too. It's there. Yeah. So it's right here I set the line height at 1.25 for all headings 1.75 for body text that keeps the body text separated and readable. And again, it all depends on the font but that's a good place to start.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we're gonna jump into the customizer and get into the Kadence Header Footer builder which I really really like new\r\n\r\ncustomize Okay, so at this point we are going to go into our header settings. And the easiest way to do that is just a click up here. And that opens up our Header Footer builder, which is super easy to use.\r\n\r\nJump in and get into the logo settings and get your logo set set your site icon the fav icon here as well. Just get all those things set up. And go ahead and make sure your menu looks good. It is your search looks good it is and then your call to action button is set up for shedule\r\n\r\nscheduled consultation. Okay, that's massive. So at this point, we would go in and probably tweak the button size a little bit. That looks pretty good. Go ahead and set our whatever the URL is going to be and so forth. That's looking pretty decent right there.\r\n\r\nNow at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and look at the tablet view as well. Look at that the logo for whatever reason isn't showing up.\r\n\r\nWe didn't we have a logo did I have a logo? The other side? No, I did not. Okay. So we need to let me just set a logo. I'll just use my agency logo.\r\n\r\nThat's pretty good. I find that 200 pixels is decent. I'm gonna go loops a little bit smaller here. And let's check this and see how it looks at different breakpoints. Yeah, I like that.\r\n\r\nAnd I like oops, it's a little bit too big here on mobile. So I'm gonna fix all of that right here, right now at this point. So I'm not going back into the header builder later. It's probably a little too much padding around this which we can adjust here. Just make sure that make sure that the phone item is selected\r\n\r\nand I've also noticed that doesn't update very well here.\r\n\r\nLive or whatever reason, but that should get us about where we want, which still too much space. Anyway, I'm not gonna spend time on that. Just get that this is something you'd likely do in your base site to get the spacing correct. In the mobile menu, you get the idea go and get it set up. At this point, we drop in a site icon now as well.\r\n\r\nYep. Okay.\r\n\r\nAnd again, be aware of changes you make. Add them to your base site if you find that you're doing the same thing over and over again. Now from here, we're going to go down to the footer of the site. Same difference, click on the Edit Edit button down here we have our copyright as the standard featuring Kadence footer. Over here I would set up you know you can set up like a multi column layout if you want and how many columns you want that to be you can drop things in here, I actually find it more useful to have a Kadence element as the footer of the site. And so you can do that in Kadence elements really easily by and I have this as part of our Starter Site. It's a Content section. Global flutter and just make loops\r\n\r\nmake a row of like three columns and set up your things there. When you go and set this up. You can say this is going to\r\n\r\nreplace the footer display on the entire site.\r\n\r\nYou can do any other settings you want but at this point, we are set\r\n\r\non there\r\n\r\nand so we wouldn't be at that point using the Kadence Header Footer builder anymore.\r\n\r\nOr the Kadence footer builder. I really do like using an element as the footer is I like a nicely designed footer with columns and things like that with our menus there. And it really works out nicely. So\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nAt this point also go in look at all your your mobile views for tablet and phone at this point. Make sure your footer is all set up correctly and how you want it.\r\n\r\nI've got a couple of different footer layouts in my starter site. One is a single has a single horizontal menu across the top with all the information and also there's a second footer there that has like multiple columns if you have silo menus in the footer, and so that's just present and already set up for both of those options in the Starter Site. And I'll delete the one that I'm not using at that point. I also have I've given you the CSS snippet, and I think this is really cool. I figured out the way that shouldn't happen.\r\n\r\nCan you help somebody click on that snippet. And make sure it's public.\r\n\r\nIt should be public.\r\n\r\nIt's public. Okay, well anyway, so I have\r\n\r\nthere's a way I discovered to link to the exact line in the gist. So that's kind of cool.\r\n\r\nAnyway, I thought that was nice. But I've given you this, this little bit of CSS here. And what this does, let me just show you a site we have in development right now.\r\n\r\nSo here is a site we're developing right now for an attorney. And what it does notice here how we have some silo menus. This is actually just the way we created this menu over here.\r\n\r\nMenus.\r\n\r\nOkay, where it's like the practice area at the top and in the sub items. That's how this is set up. And what that CSS does is keep them it doesn't indent the sub menus.\r\n\r\nBut it makes the the top one bold, and then it makes the other ones right below it. So it's it's just dropped that CSS in your wherever you're loading your your styles, that CSS or your global CSS, and it will sort everything correctly.\r\n\r\nAnd make it nice. So for these nice silo menus, like down here at the bottom here, that's pretty cool.\r\n\r\nThat makes sense everybody so we got our header set up we got our footer set up. We're going to view them and all breakpoints and we're done with that piece. We don't have to touch our headers and footers again. That make good everybody. Good. Where do we have a question?\r\n\r\nAll right, the next bit I'm gonna blaze through because it's pretty straightforward at this point in Kadence, or whatever theme that you're using, Go on in and start to customize your standard page layouts.\r\n\r\nSo in Kadence, that's page and post layout. We're going to go into page and just you know how are we going to do titles? Are they inside the content? Are they above the content? You know, how does that all look set up any backgrounds or whatever? You know, is our pages. Are they going to be naturally just normal? With margins? Are they going to be full width or you know, have her get all the standard page settings the default setting set now at this point.\r\n\r\nAnd you're good to go on pages from there. Also, we're going to do the same thing for the blog. So we want to first do our single post layout and we're going to do basically the exact same thing. That we kind of sample post. Yes.\r\n\r\nAlright, so here's our you know, just go through and set. How do you want your blog to look and again, in your starter site, we talked about this last month, but in your starter site, however you most like to make blogs, look, the majority of the time have those settings in your base site, so you don't have to go change this very much. Every time. But so we set up our pages now we're going to set up our single posts how they're going to look. Just do all our settings here for that. Now we're going to go to the blog archive page, and make sure that the basic blog archive page looks how we want it to look.\r\n\r\nSo basically, it's, you know, three posts across. I'm going to actually turn off the excerpt.\r\n\r\nThere's that you can maybe put a date on there if you want to do that.\r\n\r\nYou know, I get this set up. The way you like it. Maybe it's only two across, you can figure all that out. And on all of these, make sure that you view it on all breakpoints, just to make sure all the settings are correct.\r\n\r\nAgain, hopefully your typical settings and your base site are at 90% there and you just have to tweak small things at this point.\r\n\r\nAll right. Something else to look at is search results.\r\n\r\nSo let's search for something\r\n\r\nalright, so there's our search results page. How do we want this to look? So I'm gonna I'm gonna suggest that we do this with a Kadence element. And again, this is you'll want to have the element set up as part of your base site. We didn't have time to do that last month but we're going to call this element search results\r\n\r\nand you can choose how that's going to look we'll just gonna do a simple host list. Oh my, okay. I don't want to get into that.\r\n\r\nI don't want to\r\n\r\nposts that's what I wanted. Okay, and just make sure that we're using the\r\n\r\nthere is the default wearing\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nAlright, I've forgotten how we do this just a minute. Let me review that in myself. So\r\n\r\nyou can take a look at my base site.\r\n\r\nIt has been a little while.\r\n\r\nNot seen it. Okay. Well, all right. Can anybody remind me where we go to set this post loop as the default\r\n\r\nedit for the default query on the page\r\n\r\nthis one\r\n\r\nto left this one.\r\n\r\nIs it the K icon?\r\n\r\nI don't think so.\r\n\r\nNo, shoot. If I don't find it, right away and we got to move on. It's going to go on search results.\r\n\r\nHere we go.\r\n\r\nMaybe it'll just work.\r\n\r\nMaybe it will grab the the default query\r\n\r\nOh my okay.\r\n\r\nThis doesn't work quickly that I'm going to move on.\r\n\r\nWe're just kind of want one column so our search results look like this. We'll leave that make that however you want it to look. Let's just see if this works. I don't think it's going to work. But we'll try it.\r\n\r\nOh, you know what? You may be right.\r\n\r\nYou may be right. Maybe this is not a content element, Billy. Well, let's just see if it works. But I think you may be right Billy.\r\n\r\nNope, that didn't work. It's showing posts.\r\n\r\nBut oddly, it's showing three columns.\r\n\r\nLet's try this one more time. Yeah, I think you're right. It should be a template.\r\n\r\nWe'll start that over again.\r\n\r\nThat's why we didn't get the settings on that.\r\n\r\nHill stone for the win. Thank you.\r\n\r\nRight.\r\n\r\nTemplate placement\r\n\r\nthank you that's\r\n\r\nno\r\n\r\nokay, well, we made a mess. We'll have to look that up. So that's basically what you do.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nI think you're right, it should be a template that's going to drive me crazy.\r\n\r\nThat's still has to be set. I don't want to get bogged down here.\r\n\r\nHuh. Replace the content\r\n\r\nshould be loop item content that pulls the current loop into this on the search results. user shouldn't matter expires shouldn't matter. Explanation matter.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nI don't know why it's not working. So just do that. You'll be fine.\r\n\r\nWell, we'll solve this at a later date. Check back in office hours. Okay. So customize your search results page. Wasn't that easy?\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. Next is our custom 404 page. This is actually not a problem at all in Kadence. And so again, in your base site, go ahead and create have an element setup for your 404 page template or a four page right here it is placement on referral for content display on our not found page. And that's all we need there.\r\n\r\nAnd we can have a row and we can have put a search box in here and we can say blah blah blah over here\r\n\r\nupdate, okay.\r\n\r\nAnd so\r\n\r\nwhen we do a bla bla bla and get a four, four, we'll get our nice 404 page here. That's kind of cool to kind of have a template set up in your base site. And you can go in and tweak it for the client. Now this is this is a really neat thing to do. It's just an extra little step that you can give to your client because you know, make fluorophores keep them on brand. Let the 404 page speak with the brand's voice typography colors all that instead of just the basic not found that WordPress and WordPress gives you make them funny people get frustrated if they get a page not found so you know have something funny or engaging or interesting when it shows up. One neat thing you can do is go grab a lot of animation and use the Kadence Lotty block and drop in a lot of animation. So there's something moving around and looking neat when they hit a 404 page. You can even if you wanted to embed a game that and one of these embeddable WordPress games like the dinosaur game that Google used to embed in Chrome, make sure that you have helpful messages there links to popular site areas. Soft call to action, perhaps search box. Anyway, set up a basic 404 layout and then tweak it for every client as you're moving this forward. I've given you some really cool 404 Page examples.\r\n\r\nOh good.\r\n\r\nOkay, well look at our taco bell is Taco Bell down surely.\r\n\r\nTherefore, a four page which\r\n\r\nOh, interesting. I don't know what's going on there. Well, maybe all these are?\r\n\r\nSurely not.\r\n\r\nOkay, so like here's a Lego this isn't a perfect example of an on brand 404 page. Really cool.\r\n\r\nThis one's really neat. This is a developer's website.\r\n\r\nAnd this is how many of you remember the old lemmings game? I used to play this on that PC years ago. And it's actually you're trying to save the lemmings before they hit the crown. And get squashed.\r\n\r\nOh, and you can't hear this, but there's a really obnoxious squishing sound that's happening. Anyway.\r\n\r\nThis one's kind of neat. Anyway, you can take time and look at some of these examples just for some inspiration of 404 pages. But there's some pretty neat stuff here. Like here's a Space Invaders game play this actually works.\r\n\r\nCool.\r\n\r\nUm, let me that's pretty poor.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAnyway, you get the idea.\r\n\r\nThis is kind of neat.\r\n\r\nThis is also a game.\r\n\r\nYou can play.\r\n\r\nAnyhow, you get the idea. So just build out a nice four or four page for your clients.\r\n\r\nOkay, so set up your element just like that like we just did very easily. Okay, now this is a pet peeve of mine. And that is styling the Kadence full screen search. I am not a fan of this search experience. And unfortunately there's not a way in the customizer to really deal with this. I don't like the solid black. I don't like that it's 100% opaque. I do not like the box shadow on the search anybody with me on that?\r\n\r\nDon't like it Okay, so I've given you some CSS.\r\n\r\nAnd here is well, it's just the box shadow. But I had more here for you. It's easy enough to deal with. So here is some CSS which for simplicity, I'm going to put in the customizer\r\n\r\nand that will get rid of the box shadow.\r\n\r\nThat's much nicer. And then if you want you can just inspect this and grab the see where's my overlaps the search drawer right there and doing the Edit no\r\n\r\none is doing the color here\r\n\r\nright there it is. Search drawer and drawer enter. Actually let's let's grab this\r\n\r\nand we can make that background something like point nine that'll be significantly\r\n\r\nless opaque.\r\n\r\nIt's a little less opaque or you can change it to by the way, have you guys seen how to use the CSS variables. So down here you may have noticed in the CSS Inspector there's all these variables that are set. In some of these we get down to a spot or the Kadence variables like right here. There's our global pallet position. 1234 Did you know you can copy this and use that in CSS. So here we can say our global palette one and that's going to now be our background.\r\n\r\nSo when we refresh, it should be that blue. See there so you can pull any of these global palette items.\r\n\r\nAnd if you're using if you're in a beaver builder situation and you're using central color palette, it has a way to assign global variables like that as well. And you can pull those just the same way. So it's just bar is going to make this bigger make this where you can read it better\r\n\r\nto do\r\n\r\nso if you can use this in place of any standard like if you're gonna use hash, you know hex name for the color, it's just bar open parenthesis name and the variable closed parenthesis and the neat thing is watch this when we go and change. If we go change this in our Customizer Settings come on colors. Alright, so this is global one right there. If we change that to you know, pink, fuchsia.\r\n\r\nNow, it automatically updates because it's a variable.\r\n\r\nSo the background is that way. Kind of neat, right? This by the way is how when you change your palette and Kadence all the colors update because it's using CSS variables.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo that reaches the end of the first part. And I'm actually about two minutes ahead of time. So we'll pause just for a minute questions, comments, snide remarks about the spin up process. So at this point, you've got our headers built footers built, search page, search page, completely finished? Yes. 404 Page, tweaked and customize all of that set. And, yeah, we're ready to start building individual pages. Let's see.\r\n\r\nStacy, what was the code? So it's just it's right here.\r\n\r\nInstead of doing you know background\r\n\r\ninstead of doing it like this with a hex code or an RGB or whatever, just do var that means a CSS variable var, open parenthesis the name and you get that again from just going into the inspector, scrolling all the way down. And you'll see these global variables here and just copy this bit here and use it and you'll find that that makes life so very much easier.\r\n\r\nAh, Stephanie does the additional CSS go in the child theme it totally so it's gonna go wherever you are going to put your CSS. So yeah, it's whatever. Yeah. So if you're putting if you have a styles dot css, where you're putting Child Theme CSS put it there. I put it in the customizer for convenience. I hate the customizer CSS.\r\n\r\nSomething we started doing actually is using a Kadence element where our global CSS that way it doesn't have to go load the styles that CSS from the child theme. You can do it a lot of different ways.\r\n\r\nBut just the I guess, let me add this. Whatever you do, be consistent in your development processes.\r\n\r\nSo it goes so that you know where you're going to put it right so don't put sometimes in the child theme and sometimes somewhere else.\r\n\r\nSue is asking about that element. So the way we do this in there's a drawback to this, but I'll show you how it works. We're going to create a CSS we're going to call it global. It's going to be an HTML editor, global CSS. We're going to put that placement inside the head tag, and then it's just going to be a script tag with our CSS listed in here, so it's dropping in the header of the site. So it's all inline in the header\r\n\r\nso in that case, it would look something like this.\r\n\r\nRight\r\n\r\nso the downside with this as you lose autofill.\r\n\r\nSo the Kadence element code editor doesn't autofill CSS markup for you. So that's the downside.\r\n\r\nSo where you would add the site's CSS right here?\r\n\r\nJust as it was a script tag in the header of the site.\r\n\r\nYou're loading it as a tag just like you would anything else.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Can you change the inside of the search box asks VB well let's take a look.\r\n\r\nI see b Do you mean like make the the text box you typed in a different color?\r\n\r\nYeah, so like mate, let's make this a different. Okay, so what does that let's see what we've got here label input type equals, so this would be our our good option here. So we'll do search field. I'm just going to go back over here to CSS.\r\n\r\nAlright, so I'm going to further make I'm going to restrict this to search drawer search fields that's just going to be on this overlay page. Search field.\r\n\r\nBackground here actually, we see the background is set to transparent. Let's actually grab the whole CSS markup here.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll say let's make this RGB a\r\n\r\nso 90% white\r\n\r\nbut and we're also going to let hang on background\r\n\r\nand we'll want to make the text\r\n\r\ndark gray.\r\n\r\nSee if that works. I think it will\r\n\r\nknow Awesome.\r\n\r\nWell\r\n\r\nsee if that works\r\n\r\nyes so now we need to make it's gonna require an important which not sure why you may be able to research that and find something else that will make it not have to be important.\r\n\r\nTry not to do that. Yeah, there we go. That's not bad. I\r\n\r\nneed to change that color too.\r\n\r\nAll CSS All right, anybody else before we quit? We're right at time for break.\r\n\r\nWhy do we just stay in important Okay, so, it Sue it is best practice to use as few importance as possible. It's always better to restrict or to get specific on CSS by adding additional selectors to make it more and more specific until you target the right thing. Important is kind of case it's the use, use it as a last resort because it can often affect other things. Just best practice not to use important if you can avoid it.\r\n\r\nAnd there are many developer reasons for that, which honestly, I can't remember at this moment, that's there you go.\r\n\r\nOkay, all right. Let's take a 10 minute break. We're back at five minutes after so 10 minutes from now we're back. That'll be five minutes. After 2pm Central. We'll see you back then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute. From now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we're back for the final hour of day one talking about speed optimizations and web core vitals. So if you have listened to anything that I have been talking about over the last couple of years, you know that I have a love hate relationship with web core vitals and site speed. And now we're just gonna get right in the middle of all that now. All right, so let's talk about what are Webcore vitals and why do we need to care about them?\r\n\r\nSo Google, several years ago, introduced this concept of Webcor vitals to give preference in search engine results to sites that offer a better user experience. And so, web core vitals are like your website's vital signs, right? So it measures your site against four different areas of performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. So if your site scores high in the web core values, this might help it rise in the search results. Now, here's what I'm going to tell you. Speeding up WordPress is incredibly frustrating. Can anybody else relate to me with that? Do you not find speeding up WordPress is just about one of the most frustrating things that we do. It's just frustrating, right? So if you try to get serious about it, you're going to be frustrated. And if you're not, please tell me how. So I want to learn better, but I'm telling you, it's just gonna be frustrating, and here's why.\r\n\r\nModern beautiful websites have lots of stuff on the page. stuff on the page takes longer to load.\r\n\r\nModern beautiful websites have some interactivity and movement, interactivity and movement take a while to load.\r\n\r\nSo from the get go, they're going to be slower. To load then a very basic website. And we're not building basic websites, right. We're building beautiful modern websites for our clients, but they're engaging and users you know, like to stick around. Okay. Now, the other second reason that this whole work is frustrating is that there's lots of different testing tools available that often give wildly different results when you test a page. Like one will say you're awesome. The next one says you suck. And it's just crazy how these tools give such different results. And even this is even worse. If you test the same page in the same tool back to back, you often get different results. So it's like what am I supposed to do here?\r\n\r\nLike one time I test I get like a 95. The next time I test I get a 75 How is that even possible? Right? So it's frustrating and if you get frustrated, you're in great. You're in the you're in the club, right? We're all frustrated. There is no magic wand to speed up WordPress. There is no plugin that you can install. There is no blog post that you can read. There's no course that you can go to that's going to immediately solve this issue for you. It is hard, it is frustrating. And you know, that's just the way it is. I wish there was a difference. If you read or see anything that promises you quick and easy speed improvements. They are trying to sell you something and it's probably not going to work the way they say it is. That's just life. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo now that I've depressed everybody, let's talk about why this is difficult. speed optimization is hard work. If you're serious about optimizing your websites for speed. You're going to have to invest time to perfect your process. You're probably also going to have to invest money in premium tools to deal with things like on page optimization and image optimization and those sorts of things. There is a lot of trial and error involved sometimes a lot of error is involved in this. speed optimization tools are one of the things that can most readily break your WordPress websites, the wrong setting and all of a sudden, you don't notice it right away but up your form won't submit because you've optimized the JavaScript wrong or something like that's going on, or the CSS is all wonky. How many of you have had that happen? But you've said everything, it looks great, the site's fast, and you come back the next day, and the CSS is like, oh, everything's all goofed up. Oh, it's horrible. So, look, this is a fact of life and it's almost a rite of passage. If you're gonna try to do speeding up WordPress.\r\n\r\nSo while 80% of your settings might work from site to site, there's still likely you're going to need to dial in some settings on every site. It is.\r\n\r\nIt is frustrating.\r\n\r\nBut here's the thing. I want to tell you. speed optimization is not all there is now there are people and I know him I know they're out there. They're all over Facebook groups are talking about all we can make. Everything should be fast. If you're not getting the 99 on every 100 100 On every website on Webcor vitals you're doing it wrong. Bla bla bla, y'all. That is garbage. Hear me say it it is garbage. You're free to tweet you know Phil, feel free to quote tweet me on that. Speed. Listen, speed is one factor in Webcor vitals one of the four factors and Webcor vitals and Webcor vitals are only one signal in Google's overall algorithm. So they're one part of one part of the thing. All right, speed is not all there is. Believe me. Content is king. It's always been about content, it will always be about content. Articles on search engine. Blogs, like Search Engine Journal, have noted that Google has been emphasizing other ranking signals above web core vital So listen, is it worth spending hours of your time to notch up a site speed from a 92 to a 99? Please don't do that. Your time is better spent elsewhere. Write better content and your site will get ranked better. You know now, where speed comes into account is if you have a domain authority. That's roughly the same size as your competitor. If you have content that's roughly the same value as your competitor, then site speed might inch you out above them, but it's not you know, if your site doesn't have great backlinks if it doesn't have good domain authority, simply making the site faster is not going to jet it to the top of the ratings. That's garbage that's sold to you by people who are trying to sell you optimization services, or sell you some magic bullet plugin that's supposed to just fix everything and those things don't exist.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna step down off the soapbox now. Are y'all with me?\r\n\r\nOkay, hopefully I haven't offended everyone.\r\n\r\nHopefully. Okay, here we go.\r\n\r\nLet's talk about how we deal with site speed. Okay, number one, the number one thing to consider if you're trying let's let's let's approach it from this perspective. Do we all want to build sites that are pretty fast? Right that don't take five seconds to load?\r\n\r\nOf course we do. Right? Of course, we want to build quick website.\r\n\r\nSo there are some things that we need to think it's like this. Do you want to build accessible websites? Like do you want to audit and just like, build websites that you're you have, you don't just want to think about accessibility? No, of course not. There's some basic things you can do to make the site more accessible. You know, in the same way, there's some basic things you can do to make the site faster out of the gate. It starts with your design. Speed starts with the stuff on the page that's going to be loaded, okay. I don't care what magic plugin you have. I don't care if you have the fastest web host in the world run through eight different, you know, layers. of caching, and Cloudflare all that stuff. I don't care if the page is really long and has giant images and video and interactive elements. It is going to be slow.\r\n\r\nI mean, it's going to be slow. You might speed it up marginally by some other tactics. But speed starts with design the stuff that's actually on the page. So consider all of the elements that are on a page, every single thing, the text, the images, the asset, all the things on a page, like weight. Every one of these things adds weight. It's like you know, there's a scale and a little bucket and you're dropping in wait for every little thing that you're adding on that page, right? Text, relatively light, images, videos and interactive elements like anything that is interactive tabs and what do you do poorly do flippy cards and all that stuff that everybody likes to use? That's the technical term. By the way. All that stuff requires JavaScript has to load ads. Wait, wait, wait, wait and I'm stacking those things up. Right clients want beautiful pages, oh, put a video in my hero area and I want you know, all these interactive flippy things all the way down that well that's great, but it's going to make the page heavy. And there's nothing that an optimization plugin can do. That's going to fix that. It might marginally improve load time, but the page just weighs a lot. Bottom line. So you say to the client, I can do that. But it's going to make the page slow, and that's going to hurt you ultimately perhaps in your rankings. So could we do the same thing or, you know, accomplish the same end result with a lighter page weight? That's how we ought to be thinking about design. So key pages as simple as possible, while making them as engaging as possible. Get the fewest number or use the fewest numbers of images, blocks and modules. However, you're building that you can to get the impact that you need. In other words, ask yourself, Does this really need to be on the page? Does this really need to be a tabbed section? Or could it just be a series of headings that are maybe staggered back and forth for some design interest, right, employee animations and interactions sparingly?\r\n\r\ninteractions of any kind, like if a mouse mouse is over something, and something happens, any kind of interaction like that requires JavaScript. And so JavaScript has to load it just in it's going to make the page take longer, or it's going to add CSS if it's lots of different animations, those sorts of things. So use static elements and basic blocks or page builder modules, wherever possible. And so ask yourself Does the page really need that scrolling logo block or what just a couple of columns of images work that are static? That's the kind of decisions to make and that making sense. It's all like you got to make design decisions that are going to end up with a fast page.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. So design first, that's your first approach. Second is hosting. All right. Even the lightest design can be slowed down. If you're on shared hosting. I don't care who shared hosting it is shared hosting is shared hosting, and it's going to have fewer resources, even if that web host has their own handy dandy optimization plugin. It's still shared hosting, and it's going to be slower than quality hosting, and either a managed WordPress platform or a VPS or dedicated environment.\r\n\r\nInexpensive shared hosting does have a place, okay. That's great for personal sites or hobby sites or whatever, sites that aren't competing in the marketplace. So any site that's in competition for others for traffic ought to be hosted on professional hosting. And I'll have that conversation with clients sometimes and I'll explain you know, like last week, last Friday, we talked about, you know, different kinds of hosting and how to position that in terms of a care plan. And look, you know, I'll tell clients, you're using amateur level hosting on a professional level site, right like this. Is this is hobbyist hosting. It's not business class hosting, you got a real business, it needs real hosting. So start with design, build light pages, second, put it in a hosting environment that's going to deliver those things fast. And only then, do we worry about asset optimization. Now let me ask you a question. When you hear all these discussions about making WordPress faster, where do they always start?\r\n\r\nThey start with asset optimization. Oh, you got to get this plugin and you got to have these settings. Listen, start with design, then hosting and been at asset optimization you can optimize your assets all day long. But if the design is too big, or if the hosting is too slow, you're spinning out like you're wasting tons of time, it's not going to help. So apply strategies for fine tuning assets used by the website and there's different layers of this. image optimization is probably the very first thing I would look at, even before you get into all these plugins that tweak your JavaScript, all that stuff. image optimization is the biggest bang for your buck. So we want to come we want to convert images to web be most likely because they load quicker. We also want to make sure we are we've got some sort of something on the server, a WordPress plugin that compresses all of your images. I'm gonna talk more about that in just a minute. We also want to make sure that we have a good page and browser caching strategy, like good hosting that has a quality object cache page cache that eliminates the back and forth of going to the database. We also want to make sure finally that we're deferring CSS and JavaScript. And this is where it gets really complicated and breakable. And is the thing that's going to have the smallest aggregate impact across all your speed optimization efforts. So look, you can spend all your time tweaking all the individual CSS and JavaScript files you want. But if your images aren't optimized, if you're not using caching, if your hosting is terrible, and if your page is gigantic, it's not gonna matter. It's not gonna matter. So start at the top work your way down. Does that Okay? Am I Am I harping on something I don't need to be harping on?\r\n\r\nMaybe so, anyway.\r\n\r\nOkay. So lots of discussion starts and ends with acid optimization. Don't look, don't that's, that's important, but it's like way down the list. Get the other stuff right first. Okay. So let's talk about how we evaluate our sites for speed. So there's first of all, there's several tools available. Pingdom is a classic one, I don't use ping them at all anymore. It's not helpful to me. I would recommend not using GT metrics is a good tool however, they've moved the mobile test out of the free version. It is helpful in I do like the GT metrics waterfall view. It's it can help you see what you know, it's an easier way to see what's maybe causing a delay, but it only gives you the desktop view and quite frankly, that's cop is not the problem. In speed optimization, it's mobile. So that brings us down here to these two, which are essentially the same tool. First of all, Google's web dot Dev, it's at web dot dev slash measure. This gives you what Google sees. And that's really what matters because it's Google's web core vitals. It's free. You can see the mobile and desktop, it gives you all four of your scores in the web, core vitals categories, and you can click View Report under your URL and get a thorough look at all these things. So this is the place to go but for quick and immediate information, use lighthouse in Chrome, and I'm gonna guess that most of you have seen this already. But if you haven't, this is the place to start in Chrome. Go to the inspector. Click the lighthouse tab. And right here, we get all the web core vitals reports. I'm going to only do performance because I'm only at this point concerned about site speed, set it for mobile, and I can just run right here in the browser, my PageSpeed audit. So as you're tweaking and making changes, this is the way to do a get a quick reading on your site speed. I generally process is pretty quick 1015 seconds and you're done.\r\n\r\nAnd you'll get the Lightspeed score.\r\n\r\nOh my goodness, it's taken longer than normal. Alright, so no optimization out of the gate. We got to 83 on mobile. And so it does give you some additional information you can drill down into if you like, but use Lighthouse it's the simplest tool that's gonna help you see what's going on. Now, this is important. Best practice is to run in a guest browser. So you're not logged in and so that there are no browser extensions running. Okay, now I know some people say do to incognito, that's fine. But in your Google Chrome, sometimes your incognito mode can have browser extensions enabled. So what I do like here, go to guest This is the best way to do it. Totally clean Chrome. And let's go to this URL, and it should be faster because in our last test, we were actually logged in. When you're logged into WordPress, it loads a bunch of extra JavaScript and stuff.\r\n\r\nOh, man, it's locked down. So let's unlock it.\r\n\r\nWe've got that site privacy set up here with my private site.\r\n\r\nOnce turn that off.\r\n\r\nNow we should be able to get to the page. Oh, come on.\r\n\r\nWhy don't we get Chrome caching going on?\r\n\r\nMake sure cloud I think I turned on Cloudflare developer mode for this but I may have got to\r\n\r\njust really quickly\r\n\r\nGood grief\r\n\r\nokay\r\n\r\nokay, development don't get turned off. Alright, so let's bypass cache. That's probably what our issue is here.\r\n\r\nAnd let's go back to Oh, my goodness, come on.\r\n\r\nWell, anyway, how did I get the but the guest button. Yeah. So under your profile here.\r\n\r\nThere's a guest.\r\n\r\nLet's try this again. And you know what, maybe it may be cached. I'm just gonna go to a different browser now.\r\n\r\nOh, but I don't have a cat it's gotta be chrome\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go. Now if we run this test again, here, these are all on by default. Global.\r\n\r\nBetcha we're going to be significantly faster than we were.\r\n\r\nOver on this other one.\r\n\r\nWas it an 82? Yeah, see, it's 10 points higher just not being logged in. With no optimization. Anyway, that's why you do your guest browser.\r\n\r\nThank me later.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo lighthouse in Chrome. You can also go to Google PageSpeed Insights, which is PageSpeed dot web dev. This is it's really helpful for sites that have some degree of traffic, because it will tell you what other users are actually experiencing with PageSpeed. So it's not like a simulation. It actually shows from Chrome browser visitor data, how fast the website actually takes to load or how long it takes load out in the field. So that's a good thing. You never played with that. A lot of good insights there.\r\n\r\nAll right. So why does my site speed vary each time if you know your site speed with two different tools, you frequently get two different test results even if B tests back to back some of the factors that could influence this are the speed of the Internet. At that particular time, or the network backbone where you live that actually can make things take longer to get back and forth, could also be the resources available on your server at that moment, like if several people are loading your page or if maybe you've got several sites on your server and at that moment, there's two backups running. Well, that could possibly impact a single site speed. It could also be that Gremlins broke into the Google data center and turned some things and you know, who knows? Nobody knows why. Ultimately, it just happens that way.\r\n\r\nBut this is the big question, which is okay. Why is my site so much slower on mobile than it is on desktop? Like if we go let me go back to our guest profile here?\r\n\r\nIf we run the speed test on desktop?\r\n\r\nIt is going to be probably half a second\r\n\r\nish\r\n\r\nYeah, so one second, right. And that's twice as fast as it was on mobile. And there's some reasons for this. First of all, it's the way Google is simulating the mobile visit. So what they do, they're actually simulating a slow connection. And so you can actually if we run this again, and we do a mobile test, it'll show you that they are in fact, throttling your bandwidth and they are throttling the processor speed. So Google lighthouse and measure are assuming a mobile connection at 1.6 megabits that is so slow.\r\n\r\nIt's the bottom 25% of 4g connections, and the top 25% of 3g connections. So they're assuming a very, very slow connection to the internet. For the for the modern day. They're also assuming a slower processor. So they simulate performance on older mobile phones, and do CPU limiting to do that, which means that pages WordPress that have deep div trees on page content that are all positioned by CSS and you have to load JavaScript, if the phones if it's an old phone, it's gonna take longer because it takes longer for the phone's processor to render all that stuff. And so if we take a look here, we'll notice that\r\n\r\nemulated by a Moto G power with Lighthouse 11.2. Now Moto G power phone want to anybody want to guess when that was\r\n\r\nwas released four years ago right so it's a four year old phones or the old slower phone with a slow 4g throttling connection. So it's just it's always going to be slow. always going to be slow because of the way Google is emulating mobile. So yeah, and just by the nature of how WordPress works, it takes JavaScript load, it takes a dip tree, it takes CSS, it just takes longer to load the pages. So what do we do about this? Now here's where we get into some of the plugins and advice. The first thing I mentioned this earlier, the first thing to really pay attention to is caching. Now some quality web hosts provide you with an object cache. Many of the Managed WordPress platforms like Nexus, offer a built in object cache. Now why is this important? An object cache takes flat pages that were fetched from the database and actually creates an object that can be loaded instead of every time the page loads, having to go out to the database, grab something, come back and then display it. So it really speeds up the loading of a site. This shows up in the initial server response time. So if you're looking and trying to diagnose where your speed is, having trouble, one of the items is initial server's response time or TTFB. time to first byte. If that's high, it's because you don't have good caching in place. Because it's taking a while to go out, grab the database, come back, load the page, send it to the browser, right. So caching will help that So there's several good WordPress caching plugins as well. There'll be Super Cache WP Total Cache. Both of those are fine. If you're in a hosting environment where caching is provided absolutely use their system. We as an agency use a lightspeed server. Lightspeed is an Apache replacement that has an object cache and a corresponding WordPress plugin that puts all the magic together.\r\n\r\nAnd it works great, right? So you've got to have a caching solution period.\r\n\r\nSecond, are these all in one optimization plugins Now, if you're serious about website optimization, you need a solid no pun intended plugin that includes a full suite of tools. That includes things like page caching, browser caching, Jesup, asset optimization, all this stuff.\r\n\r\nSo you need a plug in and this is one of those things that you're going to want to invest money in because the free versions of things are often there's a big difference between the free version and paid version on most of these plugins, with the odd exception of WP amuse hummingbird. The free version is really pretty darn good.\r\n\r\nSo if you're looking for an all in one plugin, I mean, I'm not a fan of dope PMU in general, but it's probably the best single free standalone optimization plugin out there. The Pro version gives you a few extra features and some CDN features as well. But like this is a good place to start. I actually like hummingbird quite a bit.\r\n\r\nThe dopey rocket is probably parent has asked me if I've tried perf matters. I have the it doesn't do caching. So I'm suggesting taking an all in one optimization approach. Hurst matters is great for asset optimization. It's also really easy to break your site with perf matters. You really have to know what you're doing like it's geek level eight out of 10 at least, to get that up and working. Although the developers great, very responsive, it's just you know, we've taken in my agency, we've taken a different approach.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, Perf Matters is great. So WP Rocket probably the best, all in one overall.\r\n\r\nIt is really expensive. All things considered, but it does solve the problem and for the most case, it has caching it has an asset optimization. This is the one we've chosen because it integrates with our server software Lightspeed the plug that here here don't miss this. Okay. The plugin is free in the WordPress plugin directory, but I would not use the free plugin. If you're not using Lightspeed server. Okay? You can actually do some things up pretty easily with this. But if you're using Lightspeed server, which usually costs a fair amount for the license for your server, then you definitely want to use Lightspeed cache because they're a beautiful combination. Okay, any questions about this? stuff so far? Is everybody with me?\r\n\r\nAssume from the silence that we're all good.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nScrolling on down, okay, image optimization. This is also one of those areas. That if you're going to be a professional WordPress developer, you need to invest in an image optimization solution. It is super expensive, super important to spend a little money and get a good solution for this issue because like I said, image optimization is probably the first place you want to start with PageSpeed optimization. Because clients and people who aren't really sure what they're doing upload ginormous images to WordPress, and why is my homepage taken forever? Well, you have a six megabyte image in your hero area. That's why so we need a plug in it's gonna go take care of that stuff. Now. Yes, I know, you can optimize like in Photoshop or something and then upload those images. It takes so much time to do that, like oh, just by the image optimization plugin, and don't worry about it anymore. So the result of the premium version, there's free versions of most of these out there. The results of the premium level of these image optimizers is significantly higher. They're way better than the free alternative. Like there's a whole other level of optimization these get that will often result in half the size images of the free version. It is significantly better.\r\n\r\nSo pay for this. This is something just to pay for.\r\n\r\nThe image compression results between the top WordPress image optimizers are so close that it doesn't really matter. So the point is, Okay, which one do I like the best, which has the user interface that I like, and who's got a deal that I can get? Right, those are your two decision points. One is not necessarily better. As far as the results go. The user interface can vary dramatically between these. So get one that you're comfortable with and you don't mind and so forth. Billy? Yes. Lightspeed does also include image optimization. We've not gotten into it. I know some people were pretty satisfied with it. We use a standalone image optimizer, we actually use E dub.\r\n\r\nSo we have not really gotten into it. I understand it works pretty well. But it's not something we're using Lightspeed for right now. A great article here on just looking at all the different options, but like I said, e dub is what we've chosen as an agency, but honestly, main reason is because I got a lifetime deal on AppSumo a couple years ago. The interface is really geeky. Took a little while to get used to E dub is also currently back on AppSumo. But it's not as good as it's not a unlimited sites deal like it had before. But it's there's several sites on there. It's worth looking at. Some other ones are short pixel optimal image of phi. I think Melanie just mentioned.\r\n\r\nImagery. Do you mean image of phi melody? I think this is the one from WP Rocket image of phi.io. Yep, it's really good. Works with that EP rocket. Yeah, so if you're going to do the rocket, this would be a good pair with it. And of course the old fashioned and the old standbys smash the PME plugin. We quit using it because it doesn't delete the original large size images, which is ridiculous.\r\n\r\nOkay, any other questions on image optimizers before we roll forward\r\n\r\nAll right, let's talk about something else. That is one of those silver bullet things that is proposed, oh, your site is slow. You should just have a CDN that's going to solve your problems. The answer to that is no. That is not the answer. That is not going to solve your problem. Unless you're dealing with a very high traffic website. If you're having a what I would call a typical website for us, wherever you might get some visitors but it's not like 1000s and 1000s of visitors every hour. You don't need a CDN. In that case. CD ends in my experience for the typical client that we serve are not helpful at all for speed. Actually, they can slow the site down. In some cases, it's much better to invest in faster hosting than it is to have a CDN unless your site is really high traffic. So the reason for this is CDN is used to be great because in just stepping back a minute for a CDN is a content delivery network. CDN will pull your images up into the cloud and serve the images from the cloud several at a time as the page is loading. Now that was really helpful many years ago before the advent of HTTP two because under HTTP 100 means a little journey into geek land here. But with HTTP one, the web's web server would load one thing at a time, give me the CSS, give me the HTML, one image to image three and like that. HTTP two has been around for years. And it allows multiple requests. So it's pulling in JavaScript and CSS and HTML and images and all that stuff all at once. It's making multiple requests, pulling in those things at once. And so that primary original uses for a CDN is no longer needed. If your server is running HTTP two, if your server is not running HTTP two, find a new host because it's been around forever and there's no good reason not to use it. Now, if you're on a slow hosting, you might benefit from CDN that's hosting fixes this for the most part.\r\n\r\nThere are free CD ends like Cloudflare and others. Don't use those. Please don't use the free CDN. It's not going to help. It's going to slow things down. The same in my experience. Also it like it's an asset CDN. Like for example, WPM you hummingbird gives you a free or at the pro level. They include a CDN for your assets like JavaScript and CSS. As well as for images if you're using Smosh jetpack does this also know they're just not? They're not fast. It I when I use these things, it slows down in virtually every test I've ever run. Now, there may be some people out there that have had different results but in my experience it adds a layer of complication to things in the troubleshooting like maybe something that the CDN or cider like it adds more complication, and it doesn't benefit speed. So I just, I would advise you to ignore these. Now a premium CDN like the Cloudflare premium might help you if you have a high traffic sites. So that would be my recommendation. If you got a site with super high traffic, bring in the premium clouds and that will probably help but none of these other options are very good.\r\n\r\nAlso, by the way, I Cloudflare offers a per site license called Cloudflare APO automatic platform optimization that works pretty well with WordPress and does a lot of this optimization for you in the cloud.\r\n\r\nIt costs like $5 per site per month. So it can get pricey depending on how many sites you have. But it's a good it's a good solution. We have one client that's using it and likes it.\r\n\r\nYeah. So Karen is mentioning the the lifetime deal for E dub that is on AppSumo it's $99. But the catch the catch is it is only for 10 sites and the deal is not stackable, so\r\n\r\n$10 More for unlimited, I don't think\r\n\r\nyeah, there now there's no unlimited deal anymore\r\n\r\nsites. Interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, I would totally grab this if that's true. Okay, that this is different, like within the last week, because there was there's that you can find. I just read this because in preparing and updating my guide here Yeah, wow. Okay. So I think that was added since last week. Because there was even a question about that. And they said, No, we're not offering the unlimited deal anymore. So the people that app sumo apparently prevailed upon e dub. And yeah, so if you need an image optimizer, it's a pretty good deal. Just be aware that you eat dub is not the greatest user interface. You really you need to go through and understand the settings and take some time. Once you get it. You've got it. And like we have all our base in the base site. All the settings are pre done for each job though. They don't change. But you it takes some time investment to learn how it's set up. It's not the most intuitive UI Okay, that's my caveat. That being said, I love it. I use it.\r\n\r\nA class on eat up I don't know.\r\n\r\nIf you bug me in office hours, I can I wouldn't mind walking through my settings in the base site, but that's a good Office Hours question. How's that?\r\n\r\nYeah, Liz. Right. So I'm not crazy. You look at that last week or last month during the Starter Site course. And it wasn't that way. Right? So I'm not nuts. Thank you Liz for confirming at least that part. Okay.\r\n\r\nAll right. That actually brings us to the end here of well shoot that we have time right now to look at Edom settings. Is that Is that worth time right now? Would that be helpful?\r\n\r\nOkay, that's a lot of yeses.\r\n\r\nLet me do this. Okay. Some of you I know aren't using E dub and you might not care about this and you want to drop off. So let's do this. questions right now that do not pertain to E dub. I will answer those now. Anything that I missed earlier in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe'll ask those now. And then if you're not using YNAB, and you want to drop off, you can do that and you won't miss anything. Tomorrow, we're going to pick right up here with repairing a site for the client. And I'm going to show you the plugin that I wrote that I've made available to you that will allow you to drop a Kadence element in the WordPress dashboard. Lead aren't cool. It's definitely beta. But yeah.\r\n\r\nOkay, any other questions? Not Eat up, Shannon? Oh, by the way, Shannon, you're only chatting with me if you flip the two in the chat. area to everyone and everybody can see your question. So Shannon, is asking how do you convert images to web P great question that would be handled by your image optimization plugin. And so I'm about to show in either how that I have that set up. But when we upload a JPEG for example, to a site, it automatically crunches out all the sizes for the site and makes the conversion to web P all at the same time. So you can do that in desktop software, but like why, you know let the let the the WordPress plugin do that for you.\r\n\r\nSo all of these options, all these options here, either been short pixel, etcetera, all of those will convert to web P for you.\r\n\r\nOkay, if there are no more questions, I will go and find\r\n\r\nmy settings in our base site just a minute. Okey dokey.\r\n\r\nI'll actually see Yeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. So here's my base site.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm just so we're at settings an E dub. And it's really that y'all it's ugly, ugly plugin, but it's does all the things. Okay. So the first thing I do is there's a button up here called Ludicrous mode. And that's what I go into to get all the settings available because I really want granular control over what Edom is doing. So that's what you see here. If you first load the plugin, you're not going to see all these extra settings, but I'm in Ludicrous Mode. I've dropped in my API key. This by the way, is the only thing that makes this premium is the plugin is the same from free to premium. It's when you drop in your API key that you'll get when you buy a license. That's what bumps up your level to get better compression. So there's all this extra stuff here by the way.\r\n\r\nEDA includes a thing called Twist performance, that's an optimizer. Also easy IO, which is image optimizing CDN. I've not gotten into any of those things I don't. For my use case, it's not helpful, but it's got all these extra things you might want to take a look at so I will, I'm just gonna go straight down each page and let you see the settings I use. So I remove all the metadata, all the all the extra meta that's in photos, just it makes them smaller. We're going to set our max width and height at 2560.\r\n\r\nSo this way, if somebody uploads a seven megapixel image, it's going to reduce it down to size and get rid of the large size. So this is helpful to add the height width dimensions into the image as it's loaded on the front end to reduce cumulative layout shifts. We're also going to turn on lazy loading and automatic scaling. A scrolling down this is where we turn on web T.\r\n\r\nWe're also I've found that these two checkmark checkboxes help with web P loading correctly.\r\n\r\nAnd so actually, we don't have the next thing set here. Save this, it's if it's\r\n\r\nthere's usually right here and it's probably because of the environment we're in right here. But there's usually a box that shows if Web UI is working or not.\r\n\r\nThat should be showing up here but it's not.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's move to local. This is where we set our compression levels. This is critical. So JPEG Premium Plus that's the best compression you can get.\r\n\r\nIt's kind of the balance between best looking image and best compression. King same way Premium Plus GIF optimization pixel perfect PDF. This is also nice. This will optimize a PDF, the images inside a PDF that can make it gigantic. This will actually optimize those images and make your PDF significantly smaller without noticeable loss of quality.\r\n\r\nSVG optimization as well we'll turn that on default. And then I want to turn off backup originals because if I don't do that, Edom is going to save the original image and it's just going to make the Media Library even larger and larger. I don't want it to save the originals. In the advanced settings, I don't think there's anything checked here.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nIn the Resize area, you can disable resizes on any of these image sizes that you want.\r\n\r\nAnd you can allow the resizing of existing images not a whole lot here. I don't think I don't think I think these are all the advanced and resize these are all default settings. Convert. Delete originals remove original image from the server after successful conversion. This single function is what got me to move away from Smash years ago, because they weren't doing that and media libraries were getting gigantic.\r\n\r\nAlso, this is really helpful. You'll want to decide if this is what you want to do. But ping to jpg How many of you have had people but we have a magazine site that we do and they are horrible about doing a screenshot of an image and then uploading that ping. And it's massive, right? It should be like a 50k. jpg, and it's like a one megabit one megabyte ping file. So this will automatically detect that if it's not like a background like a like a image on a on a background.\r\n\r\nThat should be a ping, it converts it to a JPEG automatically. So I like that a lot.\r\n\r\nAlso gift to ping conversion like this. No warnings here. Just do it. If somebody uploads a GIF convert it to a ping and that's it.\r\n\r\nLet's see here override. I didn't change anything here from the default. I don't believe that goes up to a whole new thing. That's it. Yep. So those are my settings.\r\n\r\nThat's it now once if you put it up on a site that has something else has been on before, you can go down here to bulk optimize, and run the bulk optimizer to see if we need to optimize anything. And it'll run through and do all the optimization for you and through the whole site.\r\n\r\nOkay, well that was all the settings in EDA that didn't take long.\r\n\r\nLet me scroll up see what I missed here.\r\n\r\nShannon is using tiny ping because it's it's included in Nexus hosting channel. I don't know if tiny ping does web p or not.\r\n\r\nI just don't know the answer to that. Oh, and it appears the E dub deal is $10 per month. Not $10. One time I thought that was too good to be true, honestly. Yeah.\r\n\r\nBeth says if I switch from smushed to eat DAB I'm not going to get even more images and copies. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo if you switch from Smash to E dub, there's a couple of things you need to do.\r\n\r\nYou need to go in to the like you have to do this in a file manager or something and get into the file structure and look under wp content because there will be a folder called Smash web P or something like that. I think it's smashed dash web p where smash put all the web pig images that converted you'll need to delete that because at that point, it's just taking up space. It's not helping you. The other thing you'll want to do is go under tools. So before we were under Settings and E dub, now you go under Tools and E dub. And you're going to go through and do remove converted originals. So that's going to wipe out all the big original files that Smosh did not delete for you so you'll want to let E dub re optimize all your images, and then run in here and remove converted originals that'll clean you up.\r\n\r\nDoes that answer your question that you want if you do that you won't have additional images and copies.\r\n\r\nAll right. Any other questions, comments, snide remarks on this? So we've gone a long way today we have we've talked about getting our site spun up, building out all the things we're ready for development. And we've just pretended we built the site and ready to go now we're doing our final speed optimizations for the site. We've walked through what speed optimization looks like, what the priorities are, and, yeah, so it's pretty good, pretty good way that we've come today. Tomorrow again, we'll be starting off with preparing a site for the client and getting the admin area ready for a client to interact with. And then in the last hour tomorrow, we'll be talking through a website launch process, so that we don't forget anything when we launched the site because if you're like me, you have forgotten many things when launching a client site and it's never good. All right, um, let's see, Jeanne will either replace the JPEGs with web P images on the front end? Yes. So that's the point. It will go through. When you upload a JPEG it will convert the jpeg to a web p and then it does its thing in the back end to show web P images on the front end. Yep, that's all done for you. And by the way, most good image optimization plugins, the premium ones are going to do that they have their own way of creating the web p and then making sure that shows on the front end for you.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. I can't believe we're finished five minutes early. This usually takes a lot longer. Maybe I just talked faster today. Hello. Okay, well, that gives you five more minutes to do some things to start working on your site spin up checklist. So I'd encourage you to take that first list. If you want some homework to take home for tonight. Take that first list of a starter spin up process and just pull that into a checklist that you can use. And the next time you deploy your starter site, run through that list, and then make adjustments for yourself as you go. So take some time to do that. I will be back tomorrow, same time one o'clock Central for day two of optimizing your starter site here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome if you're just coming in to zoom, open up the chat and say hello, checking question is what your biggest takeaway from day one was yesterday? Hey, Bill, he just having a checklist. Checklist goes a long way. Yes. All right. So captions should now be working for all.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. Let me hear from you in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from yesterday was? The link for the course handbook is there it's the same link as yesterday. We're on page 19.\r\n\r\nclass time to redo those checklists. Checklists, always they're always in flux. There's all you know, they're a living document. Hopefully you're iterating and making them better every time.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. We're just about a little over a minute before we get started with day two of optimizing your starter site. The link is in the chat for the course handbook\r\n\r\nYeah, so that does make a difference. Oh, yes, Stacy. The global palette CSS is mighty helpful.\r\n\r\nFor sure.\r\n\r\nAgain, welcome everybody. We're a little less than a minute to go before we get started. Glad you're all here we are talking about optimizing our starter sites day two of the course today. Many many things to show you.\r\n\r\nHave two dogs making noise on the floor. So hopefully they'll keep the racket down.\r\n\r\nAll\r\n\r\nright, glad you're all here today. As you are coming in to zoom out. Let me hear from you in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from yesterday was anything stand out is more helpful than other things. I'd love to hear about that in the chat. We are just about to get started.\r\n\r\nI see that sounds like a good office hours. Question.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's go ahead and get started with day two.\r\n\r\nWelcome everybody today to of optimizing your starter site for 2023. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. And this is our second day of taking our Starter Site to the next level. So last month, we talked all about building that Starter Site is sort of a base for all of our future client work to replicate and move forward this month. We're surrounding that base site with a bunch of processes and checklists to make using it more and more part of our workflow. So we talked yesterday about a spin up process of what is probably the most efficient way to replicate the site and then build out the sections one after another in the in a logical order. Then the we also talked about optimizing doing some speed optimizations and what the priorities should be with that. Now today we're we are going to pretend in this process that we have completed our site, and it's now just about time to turn the site over to the client. So the first hour today we're going to be looking at preparing a site for the client. And in the second hour we'll actually be looking at a launch checklist that you can use to one step at a time. I get that site live. So that's where we're heading today. We have a lot to talk about. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello, I am dropping in once again, the slides for today or the course handbook for today. And the replay link. It usually takes about an hour or so to get that up when we're done. We'll we'll have that up for you to review directly then as it does all the rendering and gets ready to go.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's talk today about getting a site ready to hand over to the client, the whole pre launch process. So let's start with a pretty foundational question. It is one that is frequently debated in Facebook groups that cater to people like us. And it's all about you know, should you really give a client access as an admin to the back end of their site. And there's lots of different opinions on this. Some people believe that only you as a developer ought to have this access. Others believe that clients ought to be given admin access. And I think my opinion on this has not changed for many years. It really comes down to so many times we deal with a rescue site where the developer has disappeared. Or maybe it's even a situation where there's an adversarial relationship between the developer and a client. And you know, there's a problem there. And when a client doesn't have admin access to a site that they have purchased, that creates a problem that really puts the client in a bad situation. So I just believe as a matter of principle that clients ought to have admin access for the website that they own. Right. It's their website. It's like, you can rent this office but you can't have the keys. That just doesn't make sense, right.\r\n\r\nthey've purchased this website it belongs to them, they ought to have an administrator login. Now, with that comes the caveat of should the client log in as an admin to make edits to their website? Absolutely not. So I give clients and administrator login but only for use in case of emergency so if we get hit, somebody gets hit by bus like I'm not around anymore. The my whole business falls apart, whatever. At least the client has something you know, some way to get in and do something to the website. So I create the admin user but I also create an editor user that is for the typical logging in for the client to the website to make changes. And so there's even a stipulation in the contract that says if you break things as an admin, it's billable, right? So we're not beyond restoring a backup. We're not going to fix anything that you do if you log in as administrator. This is not for the logging into your website and making changes. So that's the way I approach that I'm happy to entertain questions about that in the chat. But I feel like that's a fairly common approach. And it just makes the most sense to me.\r\n\r\nSo once we get over the fact, you know, how are we going to give the client access? Let's make it a little prettier for them, shall we? So I think the next thing we need to start thinking about is we're preparing a site for the client is customizing the login experience. With a few just a few minutes of your time, just like customizing a 404 page, customizing the standard plain WordPress login page. Doesn't take long and you can really do some nice stuff with a really good plugin. So just a few small details, like just adding the client's branding colors will go that sort of thing. It just, it's an extra little touch. And it's something that I would recommend doing so there's plenty of code snippets that lets you change out the logo. There's a number of different plugins that will allow you to change how the login area looks. This is the one that I currently am a fan of it's called login page, our custom login page Customizer by Hardeep us Ronnie now for a long time we had recommended another plugin, that one has had a few issues and there's there's a lot of upgrade nags that that plugin is starting to create. So we actually featured this on a plugin roundup a few months back, and this is the one that I think is a really good one to use. So let me make some space here. And we'll get over here and activate login page customizer.\r\n\r\nThis by the way is a plugin that has a lot of installs and and good ratings. It's 90,000 install base. You know there's a lot of folks using this plugin. So we're gonna skip the Freemius stuff here. And we now have a this is the only thing I don't like about this plugin. It does add a top level menu item, but we're gonna hide that in a minute anyway, so here's login page customizer. And so there's a number of things that we can take a look at as far as settings. Do we want to keep the Remember Me option. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Do you want to have both user name and email address or just one of the other as options to log in. We'll use both and delete all the settings if you want to install Okay, so just we're leaving the basic settings here. And we're going to go here into our pages or actually, we're gonna go to customizer. Now, one of the things that this and most of the plugins that do login page customizations using the customizer, the approach that they take, is that there actually yes is a page.\r\n\r\nLet me go back here and I'll show you here in the\r\n\r\nthere is a page called login customizer now, what happens, and I don't know if you can, so you can see, I don't know if that's automatically left out of the sitemap or not that Sue's question is, you know, is this going to show up in the sitemap? And I think once we turn on something like Yoast, and if we edit this page now, I think and this would be something you'd want to do in your base site. But we can just go down here and tell it Hello, are you advance?\r\n\r\nDon't show this in the search results. Don't follow any links did actually this is all really need. Okay, so we can do that one time in our base site. And yeah, and most SEO plugins have a way to remove a page from being indexed in the sitemap that they create. So that's what I would do there. Do it in your base site. That way it's never going to be listed.\r\n\r\nSo yeah.\r\n\r\nAnd by the way, it's not a a real page in the sense like it's listed in pages, but you can't access that page. Unless you're logged in. It forces you to the homepage as I recall or someplace. Like if we go to this link, and we do an incognito window\r\n\r\nso it forwards you to the homepage. So it's not a big deal. Either way, but this keeps out of the sitemap even if it's in the sitemap it's just going to track as a redirect back to your your homepage. It's not a big deal. But here's the plugin. It works pretty nicely. You can start off with some templates here. You like the regular WordPress view? Do you want to do a background color? You know how do you want to do this? Well, let's just do let's start off here. And our background we can do a color we can do an image if we want. Let's do something like Oh no, this is kind of cool.\r\n\r\nDrop that in\r\n\r\nokay, it's not my favorite but it'll work.\r\n\r\nSo you can make some changes there regarding the background.\r\n\r\nYou can change out here the logo to something else if you'd like we'll just drop in. This isn't gonna work well because it's dark on dark but you get the idea. We can make the logo more bigger, etc. You got padding and so forth. Where does the logo click take you? Yeah, so or you can just disable the logo altogether if you'd like.\r\n\r\nSo it just drops you straight down through here and we want to put a background image on the forum. You can do that even if you'd like to that's kind of interesting. Otherwise you can set the color the padding all you have control over all of these items. Right here in a standard\r\n\r\ncustomizer.\r\n\r\nYeah, that works really nicely.\r\n\r\nClicking the button settings you have all the options here. So the one thing I like about this one also is that you can even put in your own custom CSS right here in this plugin. That's something the other plugin did not offer. So kind of cool. You can spend a little time you see how quickly like oftentimes what I'll do is whatever hero image I'm using on the homepage, I'll put that in the login page. It's kind of nice drop in the client logo. Good to go. Pretty neat. Yeah, Tina was saying the old customizer plugin you could\r\n\r\nyou weren't able to edit the login page in the customizer. Okay, I'm not sure about that. Just try this new plugin, but it'll probably work better for you.\r\n\r\nAlright, so it makes sense. Just spend an extra couple of minutes here. As you're wrapping up development. It's a nice touch. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is work on cleaning up the website dashboard. Now in last month's course I gave you code snippets that would specifically unset each of the dashboard, the default dashboard widgets in the admin area of the world of WordPress, and you know, that's nice to clean things up. But there are a few other things that I like to clean up in WordPress. You can use a there's a great plugin that I like and I've recommended it for years. It is called advanced Access Manager. This is actually the very first training I ever did years ago here was on this plugin, and it was I think, in 2013. So like 10 years ago, I've been using this plugin for that long on every client site. It's really good I've met the developer. He's a great, great guy, and is committed to this plugin. It has a huge install base. It's rock solid. So let's kind of get into this. So one of the things I like to do, as I'm preparing a site for the client, is to simplify everything like you go into a custom post type and there's all these, you know, Netta boxes along the side that are they don't really pertain to this or we want to hide them or whatever. So let's just clean all that up and make it a lot simpler to use. So even here, like going here in the Add New Page, and you know what, it's it's striking me I'm not sure how this is going to work in the block editor.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna give it a try and see how it's gonna go. Let's go ahead and activate advanced access manager. Okay, it's already active. So there's a few things so working on simplifying all pulling menu items out simplifying meta boxes. There's some good reasons to do that. Just make it easier for your client to use. Also, you can use solid central to simplify menus, that functionality is there. It's been there for years. However, it's user by user unfortunately, it's not by role, and I'd really prefer to set it up by role so that all the editors for example on the on the site that our customer you know, client type logins all get the same menu items hidden. And so you can do with solid central but you have to do it one user at a time. This is something I'm hoping that there'll be tweaking as they are going to be doing some serious work on solid central next year.\r\n\r\nSo let's focus in on a m here.\r\n\r\nThe one thing to be aware of with advanced access manager is is a very large plugin. It does a lot of different things. But the developer has created it in such a way that it's modular so you can turn off the stuff in the plugin that you're not using. And so it doesn't load that code. It makes it very light for the use case that we're going to have. And it's really, really pretty cool. So let's take a look at how to do that. So we're gonna go let's just if we're only using advanced access manager to simplify menus and meta boxes, here's the settings that recommend that you use. So we're gonna go to Advanced Access Manager settings and services settings is here in services is here. Now the first thing I'd suggest that you do is drop this all the way down and just show all the things on one page. Because there are a few that spill over into the next page and you might not realize that and not might not get all the settings. So I would suggest disabling everything other than admin menu and meta boxes and widgets. But we're just going to take a cruise down here so you can see all the things that it does. It does a number of things about securing the WordPress login.\r\n\r\nIt allows it has its own capabilities admin menu we want so that's one of them.\r\n\r\nWe don't want to get into the toolbar management.\r\n\r\nWe don't want it to manage capabilities although we good let's leave that on and I'll show you why that'll be important in just a minute. Turn this off. We don't want to have it changing any access to any URLs or posts in terms like he does so many things.\r\n\r\nWe're not using multi site we don't need shortcodes all like you can redirect based on Access Denied message as you can if you're doing a login redirect, you can use this plugin for that as well. We do want meta boxes and widgets. And we're not going to get into dopey CLI or that or any kind of redirects for log outs or four Oh fours or any of these things. Either. So we really just have these three things on I'm going to leave capabilities in place because I'm going to show you something with that in a minute. This will allow you to add a capability to a user role. And there's something that will be helpful to us with that in just a minute.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we've turned off the services right here. Now we're going to go into our core settings and we're going to disable all\r\n\r\ndisable all that so we don't want to Okay, we are going to leave the capabilities editor on we don't need this we don't need this and we don't need this. Alright, so we're going to turn those things off. We're going to leave on capabilities because we're going to use that in just a minute.\r\n\r\nI've given you some additional information about some of the things that you might want to use an advanced Access Manager. Now again, this is something that I would probably do in the base site. So get these they're going to be the similar for every site. We're going to get that set in the base site. So this part that we just did, will already be there when we replicate it for future work. Right. So let's just reload our page here and we're going to notice that things like for example here.\r\n\r\nThis menu used to be way down here long. So it's really simplified the scope of this plugin and what it's actually doing.\r\n\r\nAll right, so what we're going to do at this point is we're going to jump in to our editor user, so we're going and one thing that's frustrating about this plugin, he does use mystery meat navigation, meaning who knows what these icons mean until you mouse over them a little frustrating. It's always been like this. Anyway, we're going to manage this role.\r\n\r\nSo up here at the top, it tells you what you're working on. If we wanted to.\r\n\r\nIf we wanted to do administrator, you can see we're on that now we're going to work on our editor user.\r\n\r\nAnd what you can see that we're working on here this is our back end menu items. So this is what does the editor role see in this list right here. Now, by the way, if you wanted to do user by user, you can do that. Like here's the only two users on the site. So you could for example, have some settings pertaining to roll. But then on this particular user of that role, it could be even a little different. So that's really helpful.\r\n\r\nThis also, by the way, would let you have a client who has an administrator user, but you're still hiding some things from them. If you wanted to do that.\r\n\r\nAlright, so we are in the editor role, just be sure we're there. Okay. Now, everything here pertains to things that are in this menu. So what I like to do is go down and notice this is grayed out because typically the editor doesn't have access to the stream menu settings, I like to just go ahead and restrict it anyway. And if you've been an advanced Access Manager user before, what you may realize, okay, this has changed these used to be checkboxes. Now there's an open lock and a closed lock which is a little better of a UI, because you used to have to check the box and checking on means turning off and it wasn't not quite intuitive.\r\n\r\nLike one of the things I would do here is okay, in most client sites that we have, we use in posts we use categories but not tags. So I'm going to just turn off the tags menu, because they don't need it.\r\n\r\nMedia, right forms. We're going to come back to this one in just a minute.\r\n\r\nPages are good. I don't want them to see this menu. Under Appearance. I don't want them to see themes or widgets or this will give them elements.\r\n\r\nI don't want them to get in the customizer will let them edit menus, but I don't want them in the Kadence settings. So we can turn off all those submenu items. We do not by any means want them in the Plugins menu.\r\n\r\nUsers will leave alone tools we don't want them in that settings. We don't want them in that. Yoast SEO we'll leave alone for now. Advanced Access Manager definitely restrict Oops, no I didn't.\r\n\r\nCome back. Editor am we want this restricted? Yes. Backups. I don't want them to see that.\r\n\r\nKadence blocks. Let's lock them out of that in private site. It won't be there anyway when we launched but we'll go from there. Okay, now let's see how this actually looks. I'm gonna go over here to my list. And I've got a plug in active called user switching.\r\n\r\nAnd this is a classic plugin we've used for a long time. It's in the base stack that I gave you last month and what this gives us is a context link under editor or we can easily just switch to this user. So let's switch and see how Cloudflare see how our menu is simplified. Now.\r\n\r\nAll those things just aren't there. We don't have tags. It's a very simple menu. We hire and I explain this to the client. We create this editor user for you where all the breakable parts of WordPress are hidden then you can't accidentally get into something and change a setting that breaks your website.\r\n\r\nMy clients are typically happy that we do this for them. You know they don't want to accidentally break their website Ceu do I block them from Kadence blocks? No, no, just that menu item. They don't really typically need that.\r\n\r\nYou can still use Kadence blocks in the editor that was only hiding the menu.\r\n\r\nAnd if you want to do it differently, you can no big deal let's go back to and by the way, the great thing about user switching is that in three places you can get back to your user if you're on the front end.\r\n\r\nHere under the Profile menu, you can switch back, same on the back end and then same right here. So I'm gonna go right back to the user that I just had.\r\n\r\nAll good back to admin. Alright, does that make sense everybody?\r\n\r\nSo we've cleaned up our admin menu for all users in the role of editor. But now also we want to go into meta boxes in widgets.\r\n\r\nAnd here, you'll notice all right, these are the actual front end widgets like in the well appearance, and widgets, these old classic widgets. I really don't. They don't have access to that anyway, so you can with this plugin, hide certain widgets from use.\r\n\r\nWidgets are kind of going going away so we just kind of leave that alone. They don't really have access to those anyway. Here you can see oh, look, we've got dashboard widgets. These are the ones that actually appear here on the WordPress dashboard. So you could hide some of those if you want it to hear, but really what I'm after, are the meta boxes on the individual post types. And these are helpful that I It occurs to me I'm not sure what's going to happen with the block editor here. But I'm going to because they're not really meta boxes. I'm gonna hide tags, custom fields.\r\n\r\nExcerpt Yeah, let's just hide those and see what happens. Because I'm not sure actually.\r\n\r\nI'm second guessing myself on whether this works in the block editor or not. So if we go to add new post, let's see if tags shows up over on over here. Yes, it does. Okay.\r\n\r\nSo that's if you're using the block editor. This is not nearly as helpful as it used to be. But one thing it does do is if you have if you're creating a custom post type that's typically arranged in more of the classic editor view, where it has the traditional metal boxes, and I love to clean up especially custom post types for clients because, you know, will oftentimes have a single block of custom fields for a custom post type, and just hide everything else. And so it's a really nice way to clean those things up.\r\n\r\nAnd the idea is just get Declutter. Get all the stuff out of the way as much as possible. And I'm going to make a note to reach out to vassal about the developer about hiding these things on the back end now Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, was the first time you load advanced Access Manager on a site, it won't see any of these things yet and you have to click refresh. And that way it goes out to the database and it pulls in Oh, good. Patient error. It pulls in all of the registered.\r\n\r\nWhat did that oh, I'm logged in? Yep. Okay.\r\n\r\nI was switched over to the whole man. Am I broken? Let's try this again. I was on the editor user. Okay, now I'm back. Now it should load fine.\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go.\r\n\r\nSo, make sure you hit refresh, because it'll go out and pull out all of the Define meta boxes and widgets and so forth into this area.\r\n\r\nAll right. So the other thing to be aware of here, how many of you have noticed that if you activate Yoast SEO, a whole bunch of more well, actually just two but two new user roles are created SEO editor and SEO manager. I don't like that. I don't like all those extra roles on my site. It's just a personal thing. So what I do and I do this in the base site, because we've set up Yoast SEO, and these roles are created what you can do is actually delete these roles right here. So advanced access manager gives you the ability to create and delete roles in WordPress, all built into the plugin. So I'm going to delete the SEO editor role. Yes.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm going to delete the SEO manager role.\r\n\r\nNow this does create a problem because SEO editor and SEO manager are like the WordPress editor role but it has an additional capability and it is the WP SEO manage options. So this is why I left capabilities on a minute ago. I'm going to go over here into capabilities. And again, we're editing the role editor here. And I'm going to give my editor user that SEO capability. So right here, SEO manage options. I can click that checkbox. And now my standard WordPress editor role has all the capabilities that it needs to access the Yoast options. Does that make sense to everybody?\r\n\r\nkind of clean up the roles.\r\n\r\nYoast does it this way so that certain users can edit the settings\r\n\r\nSue does it recognize Gravity Forms for the editor know what let me show you here.\r\n\r\nIf I thought I had this in the guide\r\n\r\nOh no, that's it's actually a code snippet. Sue, I gave it last month where you can give editor users full access to Gravity Forms.\r\n\r\nShannon does it work with WooCommerce roles? Absolutely. So let's just add WooCommerce and we'll see those new roles pop up over here.\r\n\r\nSo it doesn't the roles aren't goodness. The roles are not defined on the site yet, which is why advanced access manager didn't see it. But as soon as we install and activate WooCommerce we should see those roles appear.\r\n\r\nThat's gonna get us into this wizard we're going to try to jump out of the WooCommerce Setup Wizard.\r\n\r\nIt's creating all the stuff right now\r\n\r\nokay, while it's doing its thing, I'm just going to reload the page here. And we ought to see\r\n\r\nYep, so there's shop manager here.\r\n\r\nAnd I think there's some WooCommerce capabilities. Yeah, right here. So you could we could give our editor these two WooCommerce capabilities, and then we wouldn't need the shop manager role.\r\n\r\nStacy, can you manage Gravity Forms roles, okay? Gravity Forms doesn't have rolls that are associated with it. Notice, Gravity Forms is active. There are no new roles over here. But by default Gravity Forms only allows administrators into some of the settings areas and I like to give editors some of that because editors, for example, only Gravity Forms admin it only administrators can go into Gravity Forms and export form entries. And I like for editors to be able to do that because the client may want to go in and export some of the form data, right? That makes sense. So the code snippet that I gave you last month is what you need to allow editors to do that. It's not something you can manage and roles and capabilities here.\r\n\r\nAll right. Any other questions with this part? Shannon did that get your question?\r\n\r\nA lot of times plugins have hidden roles that help you granularly customize things. And if they're not added to WordPress, you can create this cape a capability right here. And it can be anything like tests\r\n\r\nlike this great the roll. And it is now that capability which doesn't do anything, but it is here in WordPress and usable. And I can assign it to whatever roles that I want and this capability is something that a plugin could say if user can this capability name then do this. So that's how these things are used in WordPress. And so if you need for some reason to add a capability to granularly control what a plugin is doing. Advanced Access Manager lets you do that also. And you can also delete capabilities completely out of WordPress.\r\n\r\nLike that.\r\n\r\nWhat is the line at the top that says changes are permanent? Yeah.\r\n\r\nJust like it says here what I just did by adding or by deleting the capability. It's permanent. I can add it back. But there's no undo in other words\r\n\r\nso he's just suggesting, be sure you have a backup before you start goofing around with capabilities. Oh no. So like we just deleted it. And we could just we could add it back again right here like here's what I just did. I can add it and it's back.\r\n\r\nYep, but it does make permanent. What he's saying is, it does make permanent changes to the database when you do this. So just always have a backup.\r\n\r\nThat's just a good rule of thumb no matter what. Okay? make sense to everybody. And again, these are things that I would probably do most of everything we just did would be settings that I would have in the base site. There just wasn't time last month to go through all of this. But it's a good example of okay, I'm preparing a site for the client. I see all these things I need to do really, okay, I need to make those in my base site also. So that next time I replicate the site, those settings are already done. I never have to do them again. So that's the takeaway. Make sense? Everybody? Everybody good with that?\r\n\r\nAlright, a couple of things here. I'm just going to mention if you want to hide certain blocks and let's let's face it with all the blocks that are available in Core Plus, if you got Kadence blocks or some other block packages, you can have 8 million blocks right and it's almost it's almost overwhelming how many blocks can be in that list. So here's a great plugin. We did this on the plugin roundup A while back, it's Block Manager and Block Manager will let you turn off certain blocks and make them not available in the the selector in the block editor so you can really streamline you know, go through there and see, you know, what am I actually going to use and not like if you're using Kadence. Maybe you don't want to have the standard heading block. You want to use the advanced text block because it's better, right those sorts of things and just kind of clear out, get rid of any redundant blocks and just make things easier to use.\r\n\r\nWidget disabled works the same way with classic WordPress widgets. If you want to get rid of those. You can also do that with advanced access manager. And again, it does the same thing. There. Okay, so adding some help videos. This is always a good thing to do for your clients. For years. I've used video user manuals, it is something that we refer clients to semi regularly. It is a premium plugin. We do have a deal I verified this a couple of weeks ago that it's still working, but video user manuals.com\/i themes gets you a deal like $100 off per year. So it's basically $12 a month and you get these regularly updated videos in the dashboard. They work really really well and if you're a beaver builder Gravity Forms user they also have videos about beaver builder and gravity forms that have WooCommerce videos. It's really good. So I recommend this saves a lot of time. There's also a an actual manual for people who like to read stuff that's all it's all built in. It's all automatically update as WordPress changes. There's videos for the block editor and for the classic editor, and you can choose like if the site's not running WooCommerce You can deselect the WooCommerce videos and they won't show up so it's really good does it include Elementor instructions? No, it does not. So it's for serious developers.\r\n\r\nJust kidding. Okay.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAll right. Good on that. Now, I mentioned this a little bit last month as well with using customized help videos. We like the WP help plug in. Right here. It was in the stack last month. And it's a really nice thing to be able to record a loom video or something like loom and then just drop it right in one of these publishing help posts and have a you know, customized, customized help videos for the parts of WordPress that you have tweaked for your client, or here's how you do this. Like maybe you've got a custom post type that's special and it's got these custom fields to do a certain thing on the front end of the site. record a quick video as you're preparing the site for the client of just how these things work. Save it done. That way it's gonna save you time because they're not going to remember how you told them how to do it, but you got a video right there in the dashboard makes it easy.\r\n\r\nOh and by the way if you are already paying for a Vimeo membership, hopefully you've seen their screen recorder. It's free works with Zoom. It's just like a automate works with Vimeo. It's just like loom where you can do a quick screen and then it pushes it out to your Vimeo account. Pretty cool.\r\n\r\nSomething else to consider as we're preparing the site for the client is monitoring client activity. This is definitely something to consider doing. First, first line of defense. If you're running solid security you already have reasonably good user logging in so it's part of the core features of solid security under security logs, all events user logging, and then you can filter it down. Good basic information here. However, if you want some more granular information that's why last month I recommended the stream plugin. This will I mean you get way way way more granular data than the I iThemes part of the solid security log creates because they're designed for two different purposes. The solid security log is there for security logging primarily stream is there to show you exactly the very, very granular things that you did like this was just when I activated WooCommerce you see all the things that happened when I did that.\r\n\r\nYeah, pretty, pretty significant list. Its screen is also really handy. Because you can set up alerts based on certain conditions. So when maybe the client, the editor user\r\n\r\nlet's see when they are let's just say this. Let's pretend like this is the clients administrator user. And if they log in with their administrator user, email me, I want to know that this is super helpful. Right? So like, if you're if my client is logging in with that admin user that I told him was only using case of emergencies, send me an email and let me know so I can go in and see what's going on here. Right. So you can set this up to trigger under lots of different paces. You can have it send you if you're using slack, you can have it push a Slack notice if you're using IFFT it can do a lot of different things. Like it can connect to a Google sheet. And it can log the whatever over here into a Google sheet for you. It's really cool, what stuff you can do there. But anyway, or you can just say hi like this in the log. But there's a lot of things you can do here to set up stream for how you want to track your clients. And so, again for the most part, I would try to have these settings in the base site. But then as you're preparing this site for the client, just go through and make sure that it's tracking and alerting you for the things that this particular site should alert you to All right how about this one, creating a custom dashboard widget.\r\n\r\nWhy should you do this because it's friendly and helpful. And we did that last month and it's cool to have your branding on the dashboard. That's really good.\r\n\r\nThere's a couple of other ways to take though this dashboard widget that we created last month.\r\n\r\nWhere is it? My turned off?\r\n\r\nNo.\r\n\r\nMaybe I pulled it maybe I pulled it from the code anyway. You remember that the widget with the logo and all those things in there we did last month. It's great. No problem but there's a there are better ways to do it.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll start if you're using a page builder. So if you're using Beaver Builder or Elementor Here you go, Beth, you can do this with Elementor. There's a couple of plugins that were created by idea box, which is the creator of power pack for Beaver Builder for Elementor.\r\n\r\nAnd the idea box people have made it such that you can take a saved row or template or whatever Elementor calls it and display that in the dashboard. And it shows up right here. At the top of the dashboard. And it's really nice. You can create your own layout with columns and graphics and buttons and tabs and whatever you want with your page builder and lay it right here on the dashboard. It's really kind of cool.\r\n\r\nHowever, and this is where I want to spend a little bit of time now I have created a plugin that allows you to use a Kadence element for that. So if you're not in a page builder and you're using Kadence blocks, or if you're just using the Kadence theme at all. There hasn't been a way to get a block editor driven client dashboard to show up in WordPress. And so the way I had to kind of go around the world for this to make this happen in this, okay. This plugin is very, very, very, very beta okay. If it breaks your sight, I don't want to hear about it like it's this is you use it on your own risk, okay? However, it's pretty solid for my testing, but I haven't tested it in lots of different environments either. Okay, so no guarantees, no warranties, no support. Like it's on you. Okay. But yeah, it's a very simple plugin. There are three files. There's a PHP file, a JavaScript file and a CSS file. And you can drop all that in chat GPT like I taught you a couple of months ago and tweak it and you know, fiddle around with it, make it your own. But the challenge here and I've even talked to Ben Rittner, about this several months ago, of getting a Kadence element to show up in the dashboard.\r\n\r\nThe problem is like it will work with a shortcode you know, Kadence elements makes a shortcode you could put that in a dashboard box, and it would render something out. However, any of the columns anything like that don't work, because that's relying on CSS and JavaScript that is only loaded on the front end of the site, which makes sense. The block editor only loads that CSS and JavaScript on the front end it's not loading it in the admin area. And it's really, it's really complicated to get that CSS and JavaScript to load in the back end. So it's, it's just, that's not a great way to do it. So what I did was, I put it in an iframe, right? So we can go and we can look at let's just create a Kadence element\r\n\r\nand we will call it Wyant dashboard\r\n\r\nand we'll make it a Content section.\r\n\r\nAnd you can design just like you would with with anything else here. So let's just make I don't know, let's do a three column layout. Over here. We'll do an image. We'll drop in our logo.\r\n\r\nWe'll put in some text here.\r\n\r\nAnd over here, maybe we put our support form we created last month. It will drop into gravity form.\r\n\r\nAnd we're going to watch oops, that one\r\n\r\nthere that wants to form title or form description.\r\n\r\nWe have a really simple dashboard widget here. Right? Now when we get this dashboard created\r\n\r\nyou can view it on the front end it has a URL. So it's you know domain with a question mark Kadence element equals and then whatever you call it the slug, right. So here's our dashboard. It's not awesome, but it's got some stuff. Okay, see where I'm going with this. So now I've given you a link to download the plugin. It is in. It's in Dropbox, you have to click the little download arrow at the top, that Dropbox is probably actually going to uncompress the zip file for you to see what's there in the browser, but there's a little link at the top. Actually, I'll just show you. There's a little link at the top right.\r\n\r\nDid you do to download so click that to download the zip file. But you can see how simple if there's a PHP file, there's a single CSS file.\r\n\r\nAnd there's a single JavaScript file. So it's three three files. Very, very simple plugin, which chat GPT and I created with much anguish over the course of several weeks.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to activate well. It's actually already activated brilliant dashboard is activated. So there's now a settings page here called brilliant dashboard. And the first thing I'm going to do I've got this feature here, which is hide dashboard. Widgets. So if I do that and I go to my dashboard screen notice all my widgets are gone. There's not even a little empty boxes. So this hides everything and even hides the help and Screen Options.\r\n\r\nGet rid of that notice the help and screen options that would have been right there. Right. So we want to make gotta make room just for our thing. Now the second thing this is going to do is it gives us a list of all the Kadence elements currently set up on the site. And here's one we just made client dashboard. I'm going to save that and that's going to load will have too many windows up and that's gonna load it right here.\r\n\r\nBoom, look at that. Okay, we have some margin issues. So let's tweak that.\r\n\r\nYou\r\n\r\nhere's our row. Let's put some padding on our left and right.\r\n\r\nMedium on each and that'll give us a little extra room over here.\r\n\r\nOh, look at that. See where we're at now in that that quick really fast. This is a place you could drop in video. You can do anything here that you can do in the block editor. Pretty cool. Now Sue is asking can you leave it like Yes. So that's why I actually made this option. So if we uncheck this, that's going to show our stuff up here again, and it drops in our dashboard underneath this. So that's, you know, this hides or shows the standard dashboard widgets. So maybe you want both, just leave it unchecked.\r\n\r\nNow what I might do in a later iteration of the plugin is have two checkboxes. One of them says Hide screen options and help and the other one says Hide dashboard widgets for now I just have the one.\r\n\r\nBut that's how it works.\r\n\r\nSo think about all the things you can add in here. And you're only constrained by what the block editor can do. So let me show you what I did.\r\n\r\nThere's a second one in here. I'm just going to there's another element that I created with a slightly more has more features to it. So let's refresh this page. And how about this. There's a tabbed interface at the top.\r\n\r\nSo here's our main page, with buttons and whatever you want. You need help here's a place to ask for help. But look here what if you had a look or studio dashboard for this site\r\n\r\nall this is is an HTML box, an HTML block\r\n\r\nin which I put the embed that Looker Studio gives us So drop in your analytics right here and all of this you know it's it's just like any other Looker dashboard in that cool\r\n\r\nso you do have to be careful. One of the things here is we're dealing with multiple iframes. This is actually an iframe inside of an iframe. It totally works 100% There's no problems. But sometimes the scrolling can be wonky. You just kind of have to if I were going to do this live, I would have a very my look or studio would have a lot of different icons here perhaps, and it would not require a lot of vertical scrolling. So anyway, what I'm trying to do is give you some ideas of how you might use this. So it's again this is just the block editor and it's pushing it out here right there. So\r\n\r\nall right, we have reached a good point for stoppage for a break.\r\n\r\nquestions or questions or comments before we take a break class is asking when is the final version coming? I don't know man.\r\n\r\nI next week, I intend not to do any work whatsoever. Actually, I'm officially as of about 11 o'clock, to about two three hours ago I put in my vacation notice.\r\n\r\nSo I'm not doing much client work. I'm trying not to do very much at all the last few weeks of the of the year. But yeah, I don't know. Definitely not next week.\r\n\r\nThis isn't one of those things. I'm not sure when it's ever going to be final.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, questions comments? Let's see gene recommendation on how to get started with Looker studio. Ah, excellent question. We just happen to have a solid Academy course on this. If you look right here, Google Analytics bootcamp with David Zimmerman. The link is in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe looked at on day two\r\n\r\nDavid got into Looker studio here and he gave us a looker dashboard.\r\n\r\nIn this one didn't he do something with Looker and this one\r\n\r\nI could be wrong\r\n\r\nYeah, I'm pretty sure it's in this Google Analytics bootcamp.\r\n\r\nYeah, cuz we talked about setting up Yeah, and he even gave us a How many of you have used David's dashboard the basic dashboard like he gave us a link and everything would would a premium training on Looker be good for next year? I'm really struggling to put training together for next year.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, that sounds like a lot of yeses. All right. We can sure pull that off\r\n\r\nokay. All right. Any other questions before we get into the launch process\r\n\r\nJean that course also covers that, David in when he talks about in day one or two, one of the days. David talks about goal tracking goals and conversions. So that's the end of day one is what you're looking for here.\r\n\r\nIt's very it's much much much easier to set up goals in Google Analytics. Four than it was previously. Much easier.\r\n\r\nYes, or you can use Google Tag Manager, Stacy is suggesting Okay, anybody else before we take a quick break?\r\n\r\nOkay, Okey dokey. Well, it is just about three minutes till let's take an eight minute break. We're back at five minutes after so break until 205 Central time and we are quiet until then.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, we're back. Final hour of optimizing your starter site for 2023. Who's ready to go let's get this site launched our pretend site that we've been not working on for the past couple of days here. So launch process is absolutely critical. It was the very first checklist I ever made in my business because I realized every time I launched a website, I was forgetting something. And Murphy's Law says that the one thing you forget when you launch a site is probably the most important thing that you should have done. So that's what started me years. ago on this journey of creating checklists and processes. Because what I learned, especially with the launch checklist was I started out just dumping all the things that I need to do into a list and that's great. But then I started to realize, well, if I take number eight and move it up to number three, it actually makes more sense because I'm already in that area or you know, it works better in the flow. And just gradually over the years. I probably started this website checklist. Nine years ago, I would I would imagine something around Yeah, Brown 2013 2014 as when I started this, and I've just iterated slowly, and now it's kind of in three phases. There's the pre launch list, the launch list and the post launch list, which you know, theoretically could be done independently of one another, which is pretty good. So like will often run their pre launch prior to the client giving final sign off on the site.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, okay, so let's talk about this checklist. And you are welcome to use this however, like all these checklists are list of processes have been take it, tweak it, make it your own, make it fit your work, but I think this one in particular I think is just about dialed in to where it should be. So let's talk about some pre launch items for our checklist. And we're this is things that you could do day or two or the day of launch, and we're gonna start with just some checks. So we're gonna go into the domain name and update the TTL just to make sure there's not any delays with DNS propagation to as low as the DNS provider will allow you to go. Many will let you do 300 This number is always in seconds. So that's five minutes. Some will let you do last but most 300 is the lowest it'll go ahead and get that domain set low. At this point, go ahead and run your full backup and download it to local so if you're developing on some server out there, download it to right here so it's on your computer just in case something happens the percentage chance that something will go wrong is directly proportional to whether or not you downloaded that backup. Trust me. Also, next thing we're going to do, this is a big one. We're going to look at every single form or anything else that's going to send email notifications about anything. And just make sure that all the emails are right, that they're going to the right place that not only that but that the from email address matches the domain that the site will be on when it's live. And go ahead and put even though it's in the development domain right now. Go ahead and put the live domain in those form fields where it's going because sometimes if you do a search under plug in the solid backups process and in many backup plugins restoration process, they could depending on how the plugin does it they these might not get updated. If the plugin serializes that information in the database, you can't really find and replace it and sometimes they do that. So anyway, that's why I just say look at everything on the site that's going to send notification emails, make sure those emails are correct. ability. Why are we doing TTL so that when you actually flip the domain, the change happens as fast as possible. Yeah. So oftentimes, the the default for TTL ELLs is four hours, or what is that? Multiply that into seconds?\r\n\r\nAnd it's that number I forget. I forget what it is. But yeah, so why does it take my domain four hours to check well, because you didn't change the TTL. So go ahead and drop that down. You can even do this days ahead of time.\r\n\r\nIt's not gonna hurt anything. All right. So we're also going to check the admin email and on the WordPress side, it's Settings General make sure that is correct where it should be. If it is a rebuild, this is a good time to make sure you've got your redirects Correct. You might have done this already in the development process, but if not, we'll do it as pre launch. If it's a simple site, go out there, build our list of current URLs, make sure they're mapped to the new URLs on the new site, import that into the redirection plugin.\r\n\r\nGo through and make sure all the special pages are set up like our custom login for a four page search results human sitemap, and that the human Sitemap has all the necessary content that it should have. So we're basically just checking our work on these things, making sure these special items are set up. Make sure all our images have alt text unless they are decorative. So we're gonna go through the media library, make sure those are all done.\r\n\r\nCheck e dub or your image optimizer to make sure all the images are optimized and verify on the front end. That web P is working. And oh my goodness, do not forget this. If you're processing payments, make sure that the live adult that the that all the keys are right and especially the web hook, so you got to make sure that the web hook for test and live. Both of those things are set up for the live domain and put into the settings of whatever is processing payments on your site. So don't miss that. All right, so that is our pre launch check list. So now we're actually Oh, Tania, that's later in the list. Yep. So and I'll show you why it's later in a minute.\r\n\r\nSo at this point, we've got our development site. Ready, done. It's everything's checked, everything's ready. So we're going to go over to our new target server where this thing is going to live. We're going to set up the domain over there in my world that would be setting up a cpanel whatever host you do that's do the same thing. I set up the domain there. Go ahead and whatever the passwords are you created for that domain. At this point while you just did it, go ahead and add it into your password manager and into your code editor. Like I use Nova said login and check, do code text editing. Just get all that stuff set up. Now, while you just had the password it's gonna save you time later. Go ahead on in this new environment, set up your new database and user save those credentials to the side for importing later. If you're in cPanel How many times have I done this? Make sure that if you're in cPanel, one second here, all right. If you're in cPanel, and you've just to say we've just set up this new cPanel for the new site, open up File Manager, go into settings and make sure that show dot files is enabled because more than once more than once on a live webinar. I have gone in going where the world is the htaccess file. Oh I forgot to turn on dotfiles just go do it. Now. It's just better to get that done. Because you're already in the new environment. Go ahead and do your dot files. And make sure this is very important. In some hosts. When you deploy a new environment set up a new cPanel there's going to be an existing htaccess file there delete that, because it could interfere with your migration process later.\r\n\r\nAll right, next thing I'm going to do is in my dev site, I'm going to set up solid security, verify those Notification Center emails. Make sure that so a lot of times when we're doing development we'll go ahead and have auto updates turned on with solid security and just let it be keeping everything updated in development. We're going to turn that off at this point because we want to manually run updates on the live site. And I'm going to make sure that we have the setting in solid security my favorite setting in the world which is\r\n\r\noh it's not active. Well nuts\r\n\r\nthe the version management setting where it says update if vulnerability exists so that security this ought to be in your base site. Do not want to go through this.\r\n\r\nOkay, well I'm just gonna ignore that. But you know what I'm talking about right under version management at the very bottom, auto update. It fixes vulnerability. Make sure that's on because that is the best setting in solid security. I want to go ahead and change my user's password on the site. Save that someplace, update the salts. Now this is something to do step by step, okay. And I put these two together for a reason. Because here's what you'll do. You go in you will update your password. You'll save it right at that moment. Go in and update your salts because that's going to log you out. And now you can paste in your password. And when you log in your password manager should prompt you to save the new password. Isn't that cool? But do it that way makes it makes things work a lot better. And you absolutely want to update your salts. Otherwise, all of your sites built out of the base site will have the same salts and that's just bad. So you can update your salts from within solid security. You can just search at the top there for salts and it'll give you the right spot. Click the button you're good to go. While you're in solid security, go ahead and set up your CAPTCHA with whatever CAPTCHA option that you're using. I like Cloudflare turnstyle, pick your poison, and then I'm going to deactivate solid security before I migrate.\r\n\r\nEvery now and then in weird situations. We've had solid security get in the way of a migration or something wasn't quite right. And so we've just started deactivate solid security and then once we launched, we reactivate it and it just is smoother that way.\r\n\r\nAll right at this point, if we've not already created a Google Analytics for property for the site, or if it's brand new and doesn't have one, we'll go ahead and create that property. Now. Create a Tag Manager property if that's what you're using.\r\n\r\nAdd the codes or the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics to Kadence. Now remember, one of the things we did in our base site is we created a Kadence element. Remember this one called Analytics code. And this is an HTML it's a code block, and we would paste here\r\n\r\nour code and this should already be set based on the settings in your base site, the show up in the header on the entire site for logged out users. And this is just a great way to do this. Like if I'm logged in, I don't want to tracking me. It's a great way to rule out the tracking of any logged in users, you your client, whatever now, if this is a site where it's a membership site, or an E commerce site, where actual customers are logging in, then you're going to want this to be all users, obviously, but it's at this point in our pre launch that we're going to go ahead and paste in the analytics code into this element. And it works quite well.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna go and turn on Yoast and run the Yoast wizard. Make sure all that stuff or your SEO plugin of choice. Make sure in Yoast, this is a big deal. Make sure in Yoast\r\n\r\na couple of things well first of all, a couple things I am\r\n\r\nI have too many windows open and I need to turn off my dashboard because I want to show you this am metal boxes\r\n\r\nOkay, so probably you've noticed if you're a Yoast user, how it's dropping in this winter integration and stuff, okay. So some of this is going to be settings that you'll want in your base site. But here under Yoast, we're going to go down to integrations. This is not in the checklist. This is a base site setting to turn off sem rush and winter. That gets rid of those stupid meta boxes.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nBilly, would it not be better to run Yoast after migration? No, doesn't matter.\r\n\r\nI want all this stuff set before I want I pushed the site over in the primary reason here. Let's look in search appearance.\r\n\r\nSettings. Oh, you know what? They didn't update. This is okay. This should be setting sorry. Oh, they updated this whole interface. So really here under Content Types, categories. I want to make sure that like Kadence elements. I don't want that showing in the sitemap. No Kadence elements should show up on its own right to turn that off. This is probably a setting for your base site because you're not ever going to want people to find your elements in the sitemap and so just go through each of these content types and make sure do you want put like if you have custom post types, maybe you want those to show up? Maybe you don't just make sure everything's set up correctly. Same down here for all your taxonomies on the site, like product categories I probably want but do I want WooCommerce Shipping Classes showing up in my sitemap Nope.\r\n\r\nTags? Yeah, probably. So.\r\n\r\nYeah. So go through those settings and make sure that only what you want to show up on the on the sitemap is what is actually showing up at this point, I'm also going to make sure that my default Facebook Share is correct. And I bet these links are wrong as well.\r\n\r\nI've neglected to update this for the new Yoast UI.\r\n\r\nLet's see where did they put that maybe a nurse settings danced\r\n\r\nAlright, does anybody remember offhand where they moved that? I don't spend a bunch of time looking.\r\n\r\nLike it's this\r\n\r\nis also I could turn author archives off for most sites.\r\n\r\nJust a good thing.\r\n\r\nMedia pages Oh, oh god it.\r\n\r\nI can't remember. There's a setting in here where you can pick your Facebook default. Share. And I can't remember where that is. But it is there somewhere.\r\n\r\nMake sure your crack image shares so once you this is a great tool if you're not aware of this, the Facebook debugger link it is in your guide. And we can\r\n\r\nthis actually goes out and scrapes the open graph data. And it shows what how this is actually going to look on the web. So go through and make sure that the key pages of the site look good when they're shared. Maybe a couple of posts, just verify. Also I'm going to use an external website like broken link check. I know this design of the site looks like it's gonna party like it's 1999 but that's okay.\r\n\r\nThe broken link check I know that there's WordPress plugins that do this. I would rather something from outside of WordPress scan through WordPress and let me know what's going on. So the if you Nathan duck um we got to type in our squiggly code\r\n\r\nand I want to report all occurrences in that see I hate squiggly codes in x\r\n\r\nokay, so it takes a minute but it's actually now crawling through the site. I would rather have an external report of a broken link like this. Just to verify make sure there's no broken links in the site before you launch.\r\n\r\nAlright, while this is doing its thing, we move on to the management section. At this point, I'm going to set up postmark for the new domain. And we have a whole separate process for that. I'm going to add my domain details to wherever you're tracking that stuff in your world. Who's the registrar what the DNS where it's hosted.\r\n\r\nAnd all that and then add the client to whatever email marketing software you use that you can reach out to all your clients and clay in case there's an issue. MailChimp list for us. We'll just drop them on that list. Hey, no broken links so that is good.\r\n\r\nAlright, so we're down to our cleanup phase. So I'm gonna make sure to switch to my editor user and make sure everything looks good with menu items, hidden and meta boxes and all of that. I'm gonna go through and remove all unused themes and plugins. So if I had any leftover development plugins like that WP multi page creator plugin that we use to create all the pages, make sure those are deactivated and removed at this point. I'm also going to check my number of revisions. Make sure those are set right. Gravity Forms. Oh, this is a this is a big one.\r\n\r\nGravity Forms as you probably know, tracks annual analytics, very simple analytics on its forms. Like Oh, this one's been viewed one time. Well during development that's probably picked up some things. So what I'll do is all the boxes, reset views, apply them also, if I've done any test entries. To test the form, you can permanently delete entries for those forms. I'll just go through and clear all that out prior to launch. Right now. I'm also going to delete the private site plugin that keeps our that kept our site private. I'm going to go through this is something I've added recently just it makes the world better. I'm gonna go through and do the backup solid backups diagnostic tools here and force cancel and daily housekeeping.\r\n\r\nJust to clean everything up.\r\n\r\nDiagnostics page does take a minute to load as it's looking at lots of different things. Here it goes. So we go to troubleshooting. And at this point, I would run force cancel just in case there happens to be a backup running right now. Let's just stop that and then we're going to clean up so both of those things. This takes about 15 seconds ish\r\n\r\nJeopardy theme, insert Jeopardy theme\r\n\r\nOkay, and then clean up all the old data just like that. That just wipes everything clean, you're ready to go.\r\n\r\nBecause next step is to go through and create the full backup for migration. So still doing they're gonna spoon clean out all the garbage. Alright, so we're totally clean, ready to go. We create our full backup. It's a relaunch. Do not forget to do this. If you're relaunching a site, if you're able to go in and back up the current site, save it in archive.\r\n\r\nDo it. I have original sites from four or five years ago in our Dropbox archive, I just want him there for just you never know. You never know when you might need something there. So go ahead and backup that existing site if you're able sometimes you don't have that access, etc. But yeah.\r\n\r\nAnd before you migrate the site go to that old horrible, terrible site that you just rebuilt with a brand new beautiful site and go take screenshots of all the pages of the old ugly site or the primary pages. So that later when you get time to do this, I know how it goes. You can create a before and after on your website, maybe a case study but if you don't have the before pictures, you won't be able to do that. So at least just go take the pictures and at some point hopefully you'll get around to doing that. But and you can show the before and after it's a good thing.\r\n\r\nAll right. So at this point we are done with our pre launch list. That's a lot. It does take some time. pausing briefly. Any questions about this? I feed it yes, there's always the wayback, machine@archive.org but a lot of times the images aren't available for you.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, in many cases, the images aren't available. So it's way better just to do this.\r\n\r\nAt you know, and there's Chrome extensions to do full screen captures and all that. So yeah. All right. No more questions. Then let's up somebody dropped in the q&a. Gene, do you request a testimonial? You can and I used to put that on my launch checklist, but I never did it at launch. So I took it off of there. So maybe on your checklist, it would be scheduled appointment three days from now to get a testimonial from the client because usually at this point, I'm just trying to get the site out the door right.\r\n\r\nOr it could be in an email sequence you send to the client after the payments received and whatever. It could be in the onboarding email, you send them a hey, now we're moving you in our support. And here's how you request support. And by the way, give us a testimonial. Here's a Google link or whatever. Yeah. Sherry, do you ever go back into archive Site Backups and reactivate them for a portfolio?\r\n\r\nYeah, so I backup a site? Because who knows? If something like maybe there was a form entry there that they never got and they need it and whatever. Just backup the site. It's you know, just back it up for screenshots. I take the screenshots right here before launch.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie, moving down the list, solid backups. So we're going to run through the solid backups migration process, import, buddy restore, boom done.\r\n\r\nAnd somebody mentioned earlier about that the checkbox that people forget.\r\n\r\nSettings and reading.\r\n\r\nsearch engine visibility, this one right here. The one that's like the most hidden? It is, it is the WordPress site that is the most hidden and most important all at the same time.\r\n\r\nYeah, if you check that box is checked, Google's not going to it's not going to index your site. Because that check mark says no index at the top of every page but at the end of the solid backups migration process, there's the spot where it says uncheck the hide from search engines box. So you can do this as part it doesn't have to be a separate step. In other words, just do this as part of the migration.\r\n\r\nAlright, so immediately, immediately after the site migrates, go clear all of the caches, because who knows, like things get messed up weird things happen with migrations and caches. So clear the Page Builder clack, the Page Builder cache, if your whatever website optimizing tool you're running for us, it's Lightspeed through the Lightspeed cache. Also go out there clear the Cloudflare cache.\r\n\r\nLightspeed fortunately has a Cloudflare API integration, where it clears it all at once, but just make sure whatever however many layers of caching you have happening, clear all of them and it's a good practice just to go ahead and refresh your permalinks.\r\n\r\nBecause sometimes, and maybe you've seen this and I've never been able to figure out exactly why this happens. But sometimes, when you restore a site, you go to in the home page loads just fine. But you go to any of the other sites and you get a page not found, and that's a permalink issue. So go in there, right as you launch clear, the caches reset permalinks and by reset permalinks I mean, go settings. Permalinks. Switch this quickly to plain save it.\r\n\r\nThen go back to post name and save it and you're done. That refreshes your permalinks takes like 10 seconds and you're done. This is a step. Oh my goodness. Don't Don't forget this step. Okay. Make sure that all of the ways people might access your domain have been tested. So both the HTTPS version and the HTTP version of with www and without www check manually, all four of those things in an incognito browser. Because that's going to real quick let you know up there's something going on here where it's not redirecting to HTTPS or it's not working right with the www or vice versa or whatever. So check them all to reveal any issues that have popped up.\r\n\r\nUsually, these are DNS issues that are causing that. Okay, that's the launch checklist.\r\n\r\nOkay, next up is once we're done the post launch checklist. So we're gonna go right in immediately reactivate solid security, make sure that SSL is forced on the front and the back end. And then we're gonna go into file permissions. And make sure and again, this is a cpanel environment. It's probably similar in most others, unless you're in the nginx environment. Make sure your htaccess and your WP config are set to 444. Now the way you test that you go to I'm not gonna be able to get there because I'm just going to run real quick through this wizard. Which is not my favorite\r\n\r\nby the way, I am I have talked to Timothy recently about having a skip this. Put into the wizard for the or expert mode for those of us that know what we're doing\r\n\r\nbecause this step, there's a nice little visual inside of solid security that shows this to you.\r\n\r\nOkay, um, settings.\r\n\r\nAll right, so I want it is under maintenance, no permissions\r\n\r\nPROTECT system files\r\n\r\nnope, that's not it. Let's see.\r\n\r\nWell, where did it go?\r\n\r\nI wonder if this got removed?\r\n\r\nYes, recent.\r\n\r\nPerhaps it did.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're not testing for that installed security anymore. It's still a good practice to go in and change your permissions to 444 that means no access. Even at that point, if a hacker gets in and gets writing access, as the WordPress user somehow they won't be able to change your IP config and your htaccess. So this is just a good practice. At this point, we're going to go through and relicense all of our themes and plugins that require it that have domain based licensing so we'll go through edit the checklist, add any plugins that you have that have domain based licenses, many do not. They just want the key, some do and you'll have to put those in at this point.\r\n\r\nSEO we're going to test the SEO sitemap. So it's always your domain slash sitemap underscore index dot HTML\r\n\r\nindex dot XML. So there's our yo sitemap just take a look at that. Make sure that you know it looks right. Everything is there's nothing showing up that shouldn't be that everything that should show up is showing up. If for some reason this 404 is it's because you forgot to reset permalinks earlier. I've had that happen. Now we're going to take this URL while it's up. At this point, we go over to Google Search Console, set up the property and validate it add the link to the sitemap in there. We're also going to add our site add to create a property in Bing Webmaster Tools, which will connect to Google Webmaster Tools, by the way, or Google Search Console.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll import this new site you just created in Google Search Console. Which is super cool. You can add the add the sitemap there as well. We're also going to activate the index now plugin, which will preemptively let Bing and other index now aware search engines know when you have added new content. Google doesn't support this yet.\r\n\r\nAt this point, we're gonna go back through our plugin list one more time, just make sure there are no unneeded plugins or themes and delete anything that's there.\r\n\r\nNow we're going to set it up in our management system, add it to solid Central, and set up reporting as needed. We're going to go in and tweak our solid backup settings. Now, you may remember in the Starter Site course what I recommended. We didn't set them up here. So I recommended setting up three backup schedules in your base site to our dev backups. There's there would well let's just do it.\r\n\r\nWe'll say this is our daily development full twice a day backup daily and that's unable to run. We've got that schedule set up we'll also in dev have a database backup once an hour. I can't tell you how many times this has saved my backside because you can just roll right back.\r\n\r\nOh, what does happen?\r\n\r\ndatabanks only once hourly. Oh, interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, and then I'll also add in the back this should be in the base site. We're going to add our daily backup. This is what it's going to be on the live site.\r\n\r\nBut I don't want this one enabled. So this is how it should look in your base site with\r\n\r\nso weird I wonder why that just happened.\r\n\r\nIt's the current time that is so interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we have our two enabled development backups and our disable but it's already set up and I would also have this already connected to the remote destination, if we're using it. So it's just all set up and ready to go. Now at this point of the launch process, we can go through here and delete these two because we don't need our dev backups anymore. And we then turn on our regular daily backup.\r\n\r\nSo we don't have to create it. It's already there in the base site. We get rid of our dev backups, we turn on our standard management type backup, and we're going to just double check our remote destination and make sure that everything's set especially the destination folder where it's going. Double check our settings just to make sure everything's right. Go ahead and create a full backup of the site now, send it over to the remote destination, verify that it appears and then I also download that thought that backup file and then save that in the archive. So most of our client sites since we've been running this launch checklist, there's a domain in the remote destination. There's like a launched or an old it's usually called Old and then the date. That was the original site. If we replaced it and that backups in there. Then there's a launched and then the date. And that's the this first backup after we launch I pull up into that launch folder that way I've got the site the way it was when we launched it. That makes sense.\r\n\r\nSo run through one final speed optimization just see if there's anything weird that's going on here and tweak anything that you might need to just one more final once over with the speed optimizations. And then our final task, go ahead and now that it's running and everything's right over on our live server, we can go clean up the development server, whatever's over there, delete the subdomain, the back the databases and so forth. We can delete if you if you built locally, you can delete all that if you want. Or you can just wait a few days if you want to. But you had the backups that's the thing. Pretty safe to go and delete things. When a post launch call with the client go and get that on the schedule and then take screenshots of your new website. So that is a pretty comprehensive launch process that I would encourage you to take and make your own. Put your own details into it and run it several times and see how it works for you.\r\n\r\nAll right, we actually finished a little bit early today. I got plenty of time for questions.\r\n\r\nWho has questions or comments about this or anything we've talked about during this optimizing your starter site.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, this is a good list. It's taken years to refine this. And it's likely that you'll refine it some more on your own.\r\n\r\nBut hopefully this saves you a little time\r\n\r\nYeah, so we talked about a little bit earlier. Sherry getting testimonials. So I would maybe have a I wouldn't put it that part of my website launch checklist. Maybe I would probably have something else, you know, follow up actions.\r\n\r\nIn my thought, I want to run this checklist and be done with it on launch day. Right so at the most I would look at the most I have this item down here when a post launch call with the client.\r\n\r\nRight? But like this is a list that when the site's launched on launch day, I want this done. I want all the boxes checked. Done. I don't want anything hanging around like for me to get a testimonial that depends on the client and he knows when they're ever going to respond to that and so forth.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nOther questions or comments about this that yeah, Debra? Thank you. That's great.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, we still have 20 minutes.\r\n\r\nI guess we can all get some work done.\r\n\r\nAnyway, this is it. Last Chance, of course. I mean, it's office hours tomorrow. So as always, you can come on and ask whatever you want about any of this. And that might be the case as you take some of this and start looking through it. You may discover that you have some additional questions. And of course, that's what office hours are for every Thursday. And that, by the way is not changing into the new year. We'll continue on our current schedule for office hours, which is most Thursdays. We will be on Thursday throughout by the way, the holidays. So this third tomorrow, the 21st and then the 28th. We'll also have office hours as usual. One thing I will mention, let's just pull up the calendar\r\n\r\nAll right, so we're a little skinny in January. I'm still working on some of that.\r\n\r\nWe will have no let me go back to December. No live streams.\r\n\r\nThe week of Christmas here so no live streams here and no live streams here either. So that's just kind of been our habit as we get through the holidays. We won't have live streams other than office hours.\r\n\r\nBut we do have several things scheduled for January. I'm still honestly I'm working on a premium event for January and I can't decide what that is. And I will actually appreciate some input on that during tomorrow's office hours.\r\n\r\nOh Jean that the settings are in tool.\r\n\r\nI knew they were there somewhere.\r\n\r\nAnd then I just seen them. Right here. Check file permissions. Look at that. Thank you Jean.\r\n\r\nRight. Okay, so this will tell you what the current value of permissions are and what they should be. So my root directory is at 755 in order to be at 750 and then these two are also wrong and you can change these by going into File Manager.\r\n\r\nActually, if we\r\n\r\nlet's just do the P config. That P config ought to be 444.\r\n\r\nSo here we are in our development site. We just do right and file permissions and make it for what's\r\n\r\nor, or just like that.\r\n\r\nAnd change permissions and you can actually see it right here.\r\n\r\nAnd if we run this again though, P config should turn green.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nThat lets you see\r\n\r\ncam How does iThemes Training different from solid Academy? Ah, it's this it's renamed.\r\n\r\nWe are Kim you're only chatting with me versus everyone if you want everybody to see your question. So Solid Academy is rebranded I iThemes Training.\r\n\r\nIt is virtually the same.\r\n\r\nhammy why don't we get API keys for Kadence? I have no idea. They, if you well, because it's a different licensing system for each of those. So Kadence has its own licensing system where you buy and they give you API keys, but you bought on the I think side and so you have to use your I think membership. It's just they're two separate systems.\r\n\r\nYeah, okay. Yeah. See, I'll take a look. We'll look at that tomorrow. You're having some issues with Kadence licensing. I don't know how much help I'm going to be but we'll certainly take a look at it.\r\n\r\nBilly, what has changed\r\n\r\nOh class have you did you get Kadence licensed license keys for Kadence No, that's always been that way Billy.\r\n\r\nYeah, it's always been toolkit members. Log in with unless I could be misunderstanding you Billy. But it's always been right here where you can license it you click here and then you log in with your themes username and password\r\n\r\nBilly you're saying you log in with I think security log it What's your I thought it was it would be your I iThemes login, which would also be used for I think security.\r\n\r\nBest you can email me at Nathan at solid wp.com\r\n\r\nOh, and by the way we do there is a survey that I created that I would really let me give you that link because I know there's some folks here that I don't believe completed that survey. Just about ideas for premium events in 2024. Here is that survey if you would just if you have not done this survey yet. I would really appreciate it it won't take you long. Like literally here's just a list in bath you can use this to this might even be easier to send.\r\n\r\nKeep everything in one spot. I've done a bunch of potential topics here. At this link. I just dropped in the chat and there's also a box here for you to type in ideas. But yeah, check all the ones you're interested in, check all of them that you're interested in. And I'm using this kind of a way out what we're going to spend time on next year.\r\n\r\nOkay, so class is saying solid support will get you license keys for Kadence pro if your legacy right.\r\n\r\nApparently class has done that. Go talk to support a betcha they'll work it out for you.\r\n\r\nYeah, yes. So Stacy if you fill it out already, and you have an idea.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely just drop it in here. I have like some analytics going on with these where it's tracking how many people voted so don't revote for these checkboxes. But if you have an idea, just type it in here and submit please that I would really appreciate that\r\n\r\nall right. Anybody else before we wrap up?\r\n\r\nYeah, so class has gone through the process of getting API keys. I didn't know how that worked. That's one of the kinds of things that I'm not in the loop on as a contractor a lot of those internal things I just don't know. So that's good. And that might be actually advantageous. To you. If you are a legacy toolkit holder, to go ahead and have the API keys.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie.\r\n\r\nWell, I believe that's going to wrap it up for us today. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last couple of days hopefully you've got some fun checklists to make your life easier. That's the goal of the Starter Site in general is just to make everything easier and more streamlined and more efficient and all those things. Alright, I'll see you back here tomorrow for office hours. 1pm Central here on solid Academy, where we go further together.","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:951:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:7:\"Day One\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:232:\"\r\n\r\n\r\nHour One:Starter Site Spin-UpProcess\r\nHour Two:Speed Optimizations and Dealing with Web Core Vitals\r\n\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"896340402\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QPYiWyzhrWyuykljt2cY8y5bN9vox5rE\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1Nu9hmLUXl31yrzDMI2SIbrXxnzVu33PJ\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/I2QPeCEk42SJNLuhX0jC4KWiyR4?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:819:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:7:\"Day Two\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:100:\"Hour One: Preparing a Site for the Client\r\nHour Two:Website Launch Process\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"896689056\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1QPYiWyzhrWyuykljt2cY8y5bN9vox5rE\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:15:\"Course Handbook\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1mtXDluaO1-VPbjYl0urojCYRwtFZmOsm\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/NBWaWDkTsA2iEueo_3fj86KxhXc?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448454,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content );

Optimizing Your Starter Site 2023