Yearly Archives: 2016

WooCommerce SEO: change the default shop title ‘Products Archive’ to something meaningful

WooCommerce SEO - how to change the shop title - Photo: screenshot / montage by T.Bortels/cpu20.com

As you may already know, WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin – and for many website owners it has basically become the standard e-commerce solution – an affordable and rather easy to set up way to run an online shop.

The combination of WordPress and WooCommerce enables you run an online shop with relatively little time and money invested. You basically just need to install WordPress and the free e-commerce plugin WooCommerce and in a few minutes you could have an online shop up and running. But then you would probably want to get some details straight – and that be get a little complicated.

<div style="width:300px; height:250px; margin-left:20px; float:right;"> <script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>  <ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7767251772696843" data-ad-slot="5040918527"></ins> <script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script> </div>One of the details you should actually get straight from the very beginning (or at least sooner or later) is the title that is displayed in the title bar of your browser when visiting the archive pages – that is the category pages your new WooCommerce powered shop. Often the importance of the title bar can be overseen – but it is an important SEO factor. At least when you bookmark your shop or see it listed in a search engine results page (SERP) you’ll probably see why it is so important. The content of the title bar is basically what a potential client sees even before he/she visits your shop. So I would even like to call it the most important – or at least one of the most important details to get straight if you want to run a successful online shop. And since category pages / archive pages often rank rather well, and people are often searching for such categories, the archive titles are a good start. Depending on the theme you use, you might also see “Products Archive” as the title for your shop page. Not very search engine friendly – not very customer friendly.

WooCommerce SEO 101 – get the title straight first

With many shop themes, in case you don’t change anything to the default settings, the new landing page of your shop – your store front page will first have the default title “Products Archive” – and I suppose you don’t really like that. And you may also want to change the title if ‘only’ the category pages have the “Archives” in the title. At least search engines and potential customers will not find that title very useful information. If you would leave the title as it is, you would waste a great SEO potential.

Chances are that you first don’t even realize that the page has this standard title. The WordPress/WooCommerce interface lets you change the page title – and so you may have the impression that everything is ok as it is. But the title that is shown in the browser bar and will then also be shown in the search results is probably still the default title.

Changing the WooCommerce-Shop-Title “Products Archive“ with Yoast

The SEO plugin Yoast lets you change the title with a few clicks to something more meaningful. Basically every merchant should sooner or later think about search engine optimization (SEO) and the free version of Yoast is a good start. So you better install that plugin now, if you haven’t already installed it anyways.

To change the title you have to first click on SEO in the left side menu of your admin section. Then navigate to “SEO > Titles & Metas“. On that oage you should see a tab “Post Types”. Click on it, then scroll down all the way to the section “Custom Post Type Archives” where you can change how the default title for archive pages of custom post types (shop articles) is constructed. Now you can for example enter the name of your shop directly into that field – something like “Buy myStuff Online” or the like. I suppose you get the idea 🙂 and Bob’s your uncle.

WordPress as a CMS: Page Management Plugins (CPT)

WordPress CMS – Page Management Plugins – Photo/montage: T.Bortels/cpu20.com

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When using WordPress as a CMS, the blog functionality can become less important than the handling of static pages. And I mean lots of pages. If you are using WordPress as a CMS for a while, you could be dealing with hundreds or even thousands of pages. And it is probably quite common that there are also additional Custom Post Types (CPT) to be managed. So things can become a bit difficult

With one of my current projects I ran into the situation that I would have a couple of thousand pages in a hierarchical tree – all Custom Post Type (CPT) pages. The built-in page management is not really practical in such a situation, so I was looking at some plugins to help me out.

Usually first everything works fine. But the more pages you have, the more tricky managing those pages can become. This is even more the case, when you are dealing with hierarchical pages. Chances are sooner or later the built in page management doesn’t really work anymore and you would want to have plugin that helps you managing your to help me out managing the pages.

In the past years different WordPress developers have built a number of plugins that are intended to be helpful when dealing with a large number of pages. Some seem to do their job ok, some don’t. I have done some research: I had a closer look at 5 of the probably most popular plugins and I found a combination that kind f works for me. Here’s the details:

Plugin #1: Admin Collapse Subpages

The Plugin Admin Collapse Subpages does not help me at all. All it does is add an option to the standard pages list to collapse parent-child pages. The problem is, that the collapse-option applies to the pages that are listed on the default list. So if you happen to have 50 child pages on your first parent page, you won’t see the next parent page. Sorry, but this plugin seems to be useless – at least for my use case.

Plugin #2: Advanced Page Manager

The second Plugin I had a closer look at was Advanced Page Manager. At first sight the plugin looks really promising. But soon after the installation process I realized I couldn’t use this plugin either – the plugin does not support Custom Post Types (CPT). So if you happen to have the need to manage a large number of regular parent-child pages, you may want to have a closer look at Advanced Page Manager.

Plugin #3: Swifty Page Manager

At first the Plugin called Swifty Page Manager does make a very good impression. it looks well designed, clean and easy to use. Parent pages can be expanded and collapsed, new child pages can be added directly inside the list view in the admin section and you can even choose the template you want to use. The list view does even show the little green / yellow / red light, provided by the SEO plugin Yoast. Greatness.

Wordpress Page Management with Swifty Page Manager

UI of Swifty Page Manager

For my use case however I could not use the plugin, since currently the plugin does not know how to handle Custom Post Type pages. And according to the developers there seems to be not much hope for CPT users: “there are no plans for adding custom post types at this point“. Not so great.

But I do have actually some hope: the plugin is (of course) released with an Open Source License – and the developers are actually encouraging others to help further develop this plugin and add missing functionalities. We’ll see if that turns out right at some point in the future.

Plugin #4: CMS Tree Page View

Next on the list is the plugin CMS Tree Page View. This plugin enables you to manage actually quite complex page trees. Even with a couple of thousand pages the plugin still works comfortably smooth. AJAX requests only load the details you currently need. Child pages are only loaded when the parent page is expanded – loading time and file size are ok.

CMS Tree Page View

The page listing is quite reduced and may look a bit like a 90ies computer interface: very small grey folder icons stand for parent folders, very small grey document icons stand for child pages. Reminds me a bit of “Windows Explorer” that would let you organize folders and documents on your PC in the mid-nineties.

The Plugin does actually support Custom Post Types – a feature that was quite important to me.

Parent pages and child pages can be re-arranged by Drag’n’Drop – but that can turn out to be a bit difficult. Folders are constantly expanding once you move some page near a parent page. You may have to try a couple of times before you hit the right spot “between” to folders.

Plugin #5: Nested Pages

The user interface of Nested Pages is very clean and almost beautiful. And the Plugin is also capable of handling CPT pages. Clearly two strong arguments pro Nested Pages. And this is also why I first enjoyed using the plugin.

WP Nested Pages

Also Nested Pages indicated the SEO-ranking of Yoast directly in the page listing – another feature that would come handy.

But there is also a great disadvantage: Nested Pages seems to load all the pages, before it displayed the page tree. This can be very comfortable when you’re dealing with only some dozens of pages – but it clearly does not work well with a couple of thousand pages. Or actually it does work, but the overall handling becomes just very slow.

WordPress as a CMS – Page Management Plugins roundup / TLDR

If Nested Pages would load child pages through AJAX, this would be my favorite plugin to handle large / complex CPT page trees. But unfortunately it does not – and the more pages I add, the less I find the plugin useful.

Basically there is just one more thing to add: all of the tested plugins can be activated and deactivated as you like. So you can actually try them out yourself and see what’s best for your project.

PS: You have some additional / alternative suggestion?
Please feel free to leave a comment below… Thank you!

How to check your WordPress Version easily

Check your WordPress Version in the Administration Dashboard

The easiest way to check the WordPress version of a WordPress powered website is when you login to your administration interface. The newer versions print out the version number in the bottom right corner – for example “ Version 4.4.1″.

Check your WordPress Version online from the readme.html file

You can of course also find out the WordPress version without beeing logged in. A standard wordpress installation will put a file readme.html in the root folder of your WordPress directory. This file is also updated automatically with every update you run. You can then easily open that file in your browser and check the version from there: mydoman/readme.html

How to check my WordPress Version online

Check your WordPress Version online: readme.html

One should however at least mention, that some experts think that keeping the readme.html file online is a potential security risk. Hackers could take advantage of the information provided through that file – so in some forums it is actually recommended that you should delete the readme file after a successful instalation or update.

I won’t stress too much about it for two reasons: First of all, you should always keep your WordPress website up to date – and take measures to make it difficult to actually hack your site. And on the other hand most of the attacks are probably automated attacks anyways. I don’t think that any hacker would actually take the time to check the readme file.

Check your WordPress Version with a line of PHP / a WordPress-Function

WordPress has a secific function that can provide additional information about your current installation: get_bloginfo(). This is probaly mostly intersting for theme developers and other coders, but can also come handy for designers. You could for example use this function to dynamically check the compatibility of a theme or a plugin against the current version.

Besically the function looks like this:

 <?php $bloginfo = get_bloginfo( $show, $filter ); ?>

The parameter $show determines as what details should actually be shown – and with $filter you can determine, how it should be shown. es angezeigt werden soll. For a simple version check the following code snippet should work just fine:

<?php 
    $wordpress_version = get_bloginfo('version'); 
    echo("Wordpress Version: ".$wordpress_version);
?>

So if you implement this function for example inside a temple, you will find your WordPress Version printed in that template.

Feel free to find out more about get_bloginfo(); in the WordPress Codex:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_bloginfo

What’s the use of using Social Media Buttons?

Advantages of using Social Media Buttons

Popular Social-Media-Buttons with built-in counters

First you’ll have to acknowledge that Social Media Buttons are in fact very popular. Looking around the internet you may get the impression that almost every website offers at least some kind button-set visitors can use to share or like articles by just clicking some button. Buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ seem to be almost some type of obligation. And the potential benefit appears to be quite tempting: one click, and your article could go viral. New visitors, new readers, more clicks – who wouldn’t want that for his/her precious website? And all for free? Kind of – at first sight integrating Social-Media-Buttons with your webdesign seems to be free of charge. But to me the price I would have to pay would still be to high.

Disadvantages of using Social Media Buttons

Already the word “free” makes me hesitate. How could such a valuable service be free? Usually there is a price to everything – and with free Social Media Buttons it’s just the same. The first thing you are basically ask to do is give away some of your precious web estate for free. Not only that you might have to adjust your layout to look good with the buttons – you most likely also put the logos of some of the largest company on display – for free.

Additionally using Social Media Buttons the weight and loading time of your website will increase. And even if those big company do have ultra fast servers and connection, the still will be additional images and/or scripts to be loaded.

And – last but not least – with some buttons you even also give away some of your users’ data – for free. And at least to me this is probably the most important argument against the use of “Like-Buttons”. Even if you actually do not give away any data automatically, because you use some sophisticated script to protect your users’ data, you still give the impression that you might give away user data.

One general misconception seems to be, that there would be no or at least less social sharing without the buttons. But basically everybody knows how to copy and paste a URL – and most of today’s smart phone have some kind of built-in functionality that allows users to share a website with one click. And this way, sharing a link manually, people are probably also more likely to actually add a personal comment to the shared link – and in my opinions this would then again add way more value to your website than any fully automatic “free” Social-Media-Button ever could.