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Speed & SEO
25 Docs
Image Alt Tags
Last Updated: March 21, 2026Image alt tags are handled by core WordPress functionality, and are not affected by the theme. Alt tags are designed to be descriptive text used by screen readers and search engines, and the alt tag should describe the image in a single sentence. It's a good idea to use your keywords in the alt tag...
Speculative Loading
Last Updated: March 21, 2026A feature known as "Speculative Loading" was introduced in WordPress 6.8. This automatically downloads pages that you've linked to on your site, by guessing what the user might click on next. On websites with few pages or sequential navigation, this makes sense. On content sites with dozens of tertiary-content links, not at all. We have...
Google Trusted Source
Last Updated: March 21, 2026The Google Trusted Source button allows users to tell Google to customize their search results to show your site higher for search terms you already rank for. This only re-arranges that specific users search results for queries that your site may show up for already. Button This button takes the user directly to Google's "Source...
Should I remove content?
Last Updated: March 21, 2026The following is a Facebook post from Casey Markee on the topic of deleting vs. re-writing content. We've republished it here with his permission. It's amazing how much incorrect and just plain WRONG information about Google, content, and auditing exists out there. And yet Google has made clear statements that show, clearly, WHY and WHEN...
301 Redirects, Links, Canonical and Pagespeed
Last Updated: March 21, 2026This is a slightly more advanced coverage of a few pagespeed topics, as an extension of the SEO for food bloggers post. If you've been running a food blog for a few years, you need to correct this. This post spawned from a webinar put on by Casey Markee and Arsen Rabinovich, which you can...
Image file size vs. pagespeed
Last Updated: March 21, 2026We don't actually recommend uploading images larger than 1200px, but made a point of using oversized images below to take this to the extreme as a demonstration. There's some commonly circulating advice that images should be "pre optimized" and uploaded at a certain dimension and file size for pagespeed, usually 250kb. This has been misconstrued...
Duplicate Content
Last Updated: March 21, 2026Duplicate content is a between pages concept. Penalties There are no penalties associated with duplicate content. You can have the same content on every page on your website, and it's simply treated as if it's not there. Thin content Because duplicate content is treated as if it's not there, only unique content to that page...
Lazyloading comments
Last Updated: March 20, 2026We do not recommend or support lazyloading comments. Google has said that it will not index anything hidden behind a click/interaction on page, so if you have to "click to load more comments", those comments will not be indexed. This is a significant SEO problem, because comments contribute to your main content, and you can...
CLS
Last Updated: March 20, 2026We're only able to impact the lab data portion of the Pagespeed Insights report - this is controlled by the theme/plugin and we're currently seeing < 0.03 scores for sites that implement: the Modern Mobile Menu adding enough content above-the-fold to force images to lazyload removing fonts that aren't designed for CLS (or just all...
Blocking Time
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Blocking time boils down to the amount of time the users browser spends executing javascript, which is why we recommend avoiding javascript as much as possible. Our current setup uses the Modern Mobile Menu instead of the theme's javascript menu to eliminate blocking time. The Modern Recipe Index and Modern Sidebar are basic WordPress page...
Linking
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Check out the TopHatRank webinar on links, from Mediawyse, Nerdpress and TopHatRank. Internal links Andrew's tips for internal links: make sure they're NOT nofollow use good anchor text make sure they're relevant to the content don't open internal links in new tabs (with some rare exceptions, like linking to terms-of-service during a checkout flow) think...
SEO
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Search Engine Optimization (SEO) cover a broad range of topics, that can't possibly be covered in a single guide. We'll cover a broad range of topics here that gives you some basis to look into things further. SEO plugin We only recommend and support Yoast for an SEO plugin, to provide the correct schema data...
Skip lazy loading first post image
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Improve your desktop Core Web Vitals by skipping lazy loading your first post image automatically: This is generally a small improvement, and is recommended. Smart logic By default we only add this to posts where the first post-image is present high enough on the page to make a difference. By default, 1200 characters has worked...
Horizontal scrolling
Last Updated: March 20, 2026We do not recommend horizontal scrolling. This basically amounts to a slider, which are a poor user experience and Yoast thinks sliders should be banned. We agree. Mobile Horizontal scrolling seems to be a good concept for mobile, allowing you to cram in more things into the page, but it fails in a major mobile-first...
Smooth scrolling
Last Updated: March 20, 2026In the Feast Plugin 10.3.5, you can now enable a CSS-only smooth scroll affect site-wide which will also apply to the Advanced Jump To links: This is found under the "General" section of the Feast Plugin settings. It's important that this is a CSS-only solution which means that it: Whether you decide to turn this...
fetchPriority
Last Updated: March 20, 2026The fetchPriority attribute allows sites to load quicker by telling the browser how the site thinks content (scripts and images) should load. This is a pagespeed update we're able to roll out to all sites automatically thanks to our optimized setup. Simply update to version 9.7.4+ of the Feast Plugin and enable it: These automatic...
Redis Object Cache
Last Updated: March 20, 2026WordPress has added the Redis Object Cache as a recommended plugin to their health check page. This is a poor recommendation and we do not recommend or support it. The redis object cache is potentially useful on high traffic sites (1,000,000 pageviews/month), but can also create caching complications, increased server resource usage, and makes troubleshooting...
Pagination
Last Updated: March 20, 2026The Feast setup avoids pagination wherever possible. Pagination is a lower quality user experience and a sign that the site owner hasn't organized their posts properly. It also negatively affects SEO by not providing proper queues and internal link signals for Google to understand the overall site structure and topical silos, so that it can...
Pingbacks
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Our recommendation is to simply delete all pingbacks. These are not used in any way and are an outdated relic from 2000's era blogging that serve no purpose today.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Our current understanding is that our themes and default setup don't fail INP. INP measures how quickly a browser responds to user input, and 99% of this is driven by poorly performing javascript. This is primarily driven by ads (by every ad network). See this Nerdpress report on sites with and without ads. All of...
Animations
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Animations are known to cause issues with CSS and JS optimization plugins, such as WP Rocket. They can negatively impact Core Web Vitals because of the issues with pagespeed optimization plugins. They also need to be designed in a way that respects the prefers-reduced-motion directive for sensitive individuals. While we're not against animations, we've removed...
Indexed
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Google Search Console contains a report under Google Search Console > Indexing > Pages which displays a bar chart with indexed and noindexed pages: Having pages noindexed is 100% normal and not a concern. However, which specific pages should be indexed or noindexed is something they leave to you to figure out. To determine which...
Google Discover
Last Updated: March 20, 2026Google Discover is not a primary source of traffic for food blogs. It's primarily targeted at news sites and trending topics, which makes up less than 0.1% of food blog traffic. As far as we're aware, as of 2025, there is nothing specific that can be done to increase Google Discover traffic. We've heard some...
CDNs
Last Updated: March 20, 2026CDNs are not recommended or supported for most users. They are typically unnecessary unless your site is generating significant traffic and revenue. From a theme and plugin standpoint, a properly configured setup with good hosting and caching will provide the majority of performance benefits without the added complexity. We generally recommend avoiding CDNs until you are earning...
Site Speed
Last Updated: March 20, 2026The 3 biggest factors for pagespeed are: No amount of tweaking can fix a bad host, bad theme, poor quality ads, or bad pagespeed plugins. What Actually Moves the Needle If you want faster page speeds, focus on: These are the changes that consistently produce meaningful improvements. Running Ads Ads are one of the biggest...