hey welcome back to the next lesson in our course on creating a WordPress website from scratch where we're going through the entire process from nothing at all to a completed and finished WordPress website with hundreds of blog posts hundreds of affiliate links walking you through the entire process step by step this course is completely free in the description down below there's links to every lesson in this course if you're just joining us stop watching right now and because it won't help you if you just joined us and watch this video it's not going to help you watch the first video in the series and follow along I'm going to show you how to choose a niche I'm going to show you how to keyword cluster I'm going to show you how to choose a domain name I'm going to show you how to um choose a host and then also install WordPress and set up your theme and your block Builder and then configure your homepage to look just amazing and then to add uh hundreds of different product Roundup posts and then other info posts everything walking through the entire process so go watch those videos if you have not now if you're joining us from the previous video first of all congratulations on getting this far proud of you I really am it's a cool feeling to to have a site that you've created yourself it's just a cool feeling it never gets old on me at least and last video we did some cleanup of our theme and made everything look nice and we made the category Pages just pop a little bit what we're going to do now in this video will be installing some different WordPress plugins that that help with different things that help with SEO that help with optimization and some other features too next video we're going to talk about email setting that up and that's optional maybe you don't even care about setting up an email but that's going to be optional and then the final video we're going to set up a Pinterest we're going to talk about that a little bit two things we got to clean up from the previous video that I forgot to do so the first thing is remember the last video we turned on where is that boxed view to help our YouTube video display properly remember cuz on wide view it was like a 1 by one aspect ratio but then on box view it it gave us the 16 by9 which is great but on mobile over here boxed view it gives us these borders over here and and it's just it compresses the text too much so what we got to do is we'll come back over here and let me show you how we just got in here let's start from scratch again go on a like a blog post for instance like just this any post and we'll click customize and we are going to so we're on a single blog post right now we'll scroll down to post types in single post and so we're on box right now on desktop and on tablet we're unboxed but on mobile we want to turn off booxed so we'll go back to wide so publish it so what's cool is so we're on Boxed for for desktop boxed for tablet but on normal for but on wide for our cell phones and things like that so let's refresh this now and see how it looks so that looks a lot better although when I did that though so it removed this this margin up here so let's get that back I think that's this option here so let's bring that back to right here top and bottom and let's see there we go so we fixed that so it all scrolling down it all looks good now the other thing is this related posts I I added this in and I I'm like I should probably show them if you have the paid version of bloy uh then you can add this related Post in here and it looks really nice it's at the end of your posts so we're on this single post page so down here is this related post and we can just turn it on and then at the bottom of the post it will pull related posts and it has this little uh little arrow right here so that means we can click on it and there's lots more options here you can do all kinds of customization and configuration uh for this you can say I want three columns with three posts you can pull it by category by tag so we're going to pull everything in the same category that we're in you're basically building internal links to to different stuff inside of the same category you can sort by recent most commented or random let's actually sort by random give us some some boost there module title H3 you do featured image you can Define the aspect ratio if you want to let's see here I don't know why something's off screen 2x1 4x3 that's cool you I guess you can even do custom right wow we you can do two by three that's neat I didn't even think about doing something like that because all of our images are 2 by3 that's yeah that's pretty sweet I've never done a 2x3 aspect ratio BL uh blog before all my stuff is always 16 by9 but that's really cool I showed my wife this site yesterday and she was really enjoying the images so let's see comments we can do publish date turn off comments even though we're not even using comments module placement contains a lot of cool stuff to play with inside of here so we'll publish that and it looks great both on on desktop and also mobile so that's Let's see we got the related post we talked about that we talked about setting format to to wide on mobile now let's actually install some plugins that's enough cleanup from previously so let's go back to our backend and go to our plug-in section now the first plugin I want to install is something called fluent snippet and this is free that's a cool thing when the plugins are free fluent Snippets and we'll click install and install now what this will do is this will if you click on it it will allow you to you can create your first snippet you can inject stuff whether it's PHP code or PHP and HTML or css or JavaScript anywhere on your site and have it run anywhere on your site it's it's a great uh snippet manager and there's grouping you can apply all kinds of customization with Advanced logic and stuff like that it's great I love the team behind this and it's great that they made this free just an FYI if you if you're trying to install like a tracking code or something it's not going to go under JavaScript it would go under this one PHP and HTML so that took me a little bit to figure out but you'll put your like tracking codes and stuff like that in here and you'll create the snippet and then you got to activate the snippet now in this course we're not going to be connecting Google search console in Google analytics I am moving away from Google for AI sites so we don't use Google anymore I use clicky which is a paid click tracking platform the other thing I use is Microsoft Clarity and that's what we're going to install right now so let me show you what Clarity is it's offered for free by Microsoft and it's great this is you can search for Microsoft Clarity by going to Google and we're going to so long story short we're going to get a code and we're going to from Clarity and we're going to put that into this fluent snippet area Okay so this is what Microsoft Clarity is this is my site I've added my site you can add as many sites as you want I don't think there's a limit and it shows you a lot of different analytics about your site but you can click on recordings and watch people navigate around your site so let's find somebody who's clicked around a couple times this person's from the United Kingdom so he's reading about custom if this is you if you're reading about custom your custom background I'm proud of you you not a lot of people read the the guides so this is Clarity you can watch how people are interacting with your sites it's not very useful for my stuff but if you have an info site like this or you have some product roundups you can see what people are reading are they reading the introduction are they reading the key takeaways are they reading the text or are they just looking at the pictures so getting an idea of how they're consuming information on your site can help you adjust the layout and the content of your site that's why I think something like Microsoft Clarity is so great back in the day they still have something called hot jar but back in the day hot jar was like the go-to heat map software that allowed you to view this but it's paid and so Clarity came along by Microsoft and it's completely free so you can watch Heat Maps too so let's watch let's see people looking at this so number one most people are clicking on here what's this page builder so most people are clicking on that and and then 14 clicks on best online marketing tool so this is in the last 3 days so you can there's so much analytics in here this is just absolutely great so we're going to install Clarity uh so you can do this too on your site and see what visitors are doing so you'll create a you log into Microsoft and I don't know if you have to create like a Clarity account I think it's just unlocks when you log in with your Microsoft account but we're going to add our you'll go into Clarity clarity. microsoft. com we going to click on new project and we're going to add our project so this project will be designer affair.
com and here's our website remember no www and selected industry other how about that almost there so install manually get tracking code copy this code to clipboard go over here to fluid Snippets make sure you're you've clicked on this one content PHP and HTML paste this code right in here and we'll call this Clarity and then we have to apply where it's going to run so we'll select this box right here and this will be a sitewide header insert snippet between the head tags of your website front end we don't want to track what I'm doing on the back end that's just useless so we'll track what's on the front end and we click create snippet then we click activate now back when I was talking about web hosts I said that I have some sites my ranking tactics site and another site hosted on wpmu dev on that site when I clicked activate it wouldn't activate and I realized that their web application firewall was block like one of the rules for it was blocking the activation so I had to go in there and deactivate that particular rule that was a headache for me to find and I consider myself you know technically savvy so if you are having problems activating this then it very well could be some kind of firewall on your host that you'd have to look into but we're using cloudways and I have not had any issues with this now this code will be running now on the front end of our site so now we'll have this up and running and when you all visit my site I can watch you guys consume information so that's done we can leave that so the next plugin we want to install is an H capture plugin you know how you have to like log into stuff and solve those puzzles before you can log in we want to add that to our site and we're going to apply it to the login screen and then also to our contact us form so we'll click on plugins and add new plugin now Google has a capture to but to do that you'd have to add all your sites to Google and I'm like I don't really want to do that so I again pulling all my stuff away from Google and just using thirdparty stuff so H Capa and this is free to use up to a million million tries in a month or something like that I don't have a million people trying to log into my site in a month so or trying to contact me in a month so I don't think I'll ever need a paid paid plan so we'll click install now and activate and H capture will'll go there there's directions here to get your site key and a secret key this you don't have to create a new site key and secret key for each site you can just use them on all of your sites you'll click here you'll go to H Capa you'll sign up for an account you'll log in and then you'll create your uh site key and secret key so here's my site key key and I'll enter my secret key and I'll click I am human click on the entity that can be seen in the sample image Ice Cream I'm doing keto right now so that's hard let's see and I'll say now this lights up so I can check it I guess if you don't do it right it won't turn on so I think I can save it now perfect so we should be good to go turn off when logged in to users okay we don't need it to logged in users so what I'm going to do now is click on Integrations and we want this for I'm going to turn it on for everything even though like I don't have comments on so we just turn it on for everything but it's compatible with all this other stuff on here so I can log out and now when I go to log in we have a nice pretty capture so log in I am human select each bird that is pictured alone in the image all right remember me log in fantastic so what we're going to do now is install an optimization plugin to help our site speed and I've tried a lot of different ones I found that one that I really enjoy it's called perf matters and it's a paid one so again you don't have to use it if you don't want to but I'll show you in one second so I got two pages here I just want to demonstrate something so this is how to decorate your school classroom for the holidays this is the one with the YouTube video and the page speed feed at Google for that right now is on mobile 63% shows you what's wrong with it so a lot of the problem is the embedded YouTube player through the if frame it's just it's really eating up a lot of this this loading time and that's one of the reasons we have this lower score and then I have this other page over here seven Charming Cottage Christmas decor ideas now there's no there's no YouTube video on here but it's still slow a little bit and defer offscreen images so it's trying to load all these images so what I like is I just use perf matters and it seems to do the trick it's super easy to do you go to perfm matters. and again it's not free one sit's 24 a year unlimited sit's 124 this is completely up to you I have a link an affiliate Link in the description down below completely up to you I'm not trying to push this on you I'm just saying you want to eventually consider sight speed and if you're having sight speed issues you're going to want to look into a solution so let me install perf matters and we'll check out the the result and I'm also I have something really cool I just can't do two things at once perf matters uh I have a settings file for perf matters so you can just import it to your your WordPress site and it will activate all the recommended settings that that I'm using on my site so I've installed perf matters and I click on settings and perf matters and I need to put my license key in give me one second my license key active now all I have to do check this out is I go to tools and I go to choose file and I will give you guys this file right here this is perf matter settings export so it'll give you that and you click import settings and save and then what that will do is there's just some preconfigured things that I already do so you can have it all preconfigured for you now if you're going through what I have here it should all work just fine but if you're using a different host or something like that there might be like deferring the JavaScript might break something so you might have to come in here and reconfigure it or something something like that but we have lazy loading now and then we have the iframe videos and YouTube preview thumbnails so it's doing a lot behind the scenes so now we'll go over here and I'll take this this was the URL with the YouTube video and we'll redo it in this new window and while that's happening we'll redo the non YouTube video blog post and let's see what we get so 93 I actually had to pause the video because the score was lower initially this is like 54 and I'm like why is the score down I don't understand that and it's because I forgot that you need to come in here to Breeze and Purge all the cash otherwise the optimization won't be displayed on the page until the cash is refreshed so you come in here to Breeze and you purge all the cash and so this is what we got so we got we went from 63 to 93 so now all that YouTube stuff like if we scroll down here this YouTube thing that was like the embedded player that was eating up a lot of our time like 5. 5 seconds and whatnot is just totally removed now there's more stuff we can optimize freaking 93% on desktop that's great and our CLS went down let's see from just a little bit 038 to 0033 and then on desktop we're like we're pretty good we can mess with our SEO but that's in terms of performance that's great so this this site now this URL this is the one without the YouTube video and for this we have 97 so we went from 81 to 97 see there's still more that we can potentially save over here and everything should still be working great over here everything looks looks great sometimes you have to look at this because some of the optimizations that we do can mess up the layout on certain themes and whatnot but on on what we have here everything looks great I have no complaints it all still is exactly how we designed it because we're doing Lazy loading we're doing minimizing the JavaScript and Min minimizing the CSS so yeah 81 to 97 and then on desktop we're at like 9890 92 100 so that's perf matters there's all kinds of cool settings you can do in here I'm not going to go through all of them but but yeah really powerful so the next thing we're going to install is our SEO plugin there's a myriad of SEO plugins out there a lot of people enjoy using rank math a lot of people use Zenith a lot of people use SE o press there's tons of them out there and some of them are very bloated some of them do way more than you need there's yast too U I won't say which ones are bloated but there are some that will slow down your site there are a lot that will display like an SEO score and things like this things that I think are are useless so there's a lot of different features in these plugins what I really want out of an SEO plugin is a way to change my my meta title and my meta description and to deal with the OG images for social media and that's and then also redirections I can do my redirections and things like that those are the main thing oh and then I gu site Maps I think those are the main things that I really use everything else I don't really need very much so I have a year subscription to SEO press and it's nice but we're going to for this video we're just going to install the free version the free version gives you a lot yeah you can do a lot in the free version so let's just install the free version SEO press install now activate this is like different than perf matters perf matters is like simple and to the point it knows what it does and it does it very well these types of plugins they have a lot of like alerts and notifications and things that are really important and configure your SEO in 5 minutes it's almost like a lot of this stuff isn't really necessary so don't get too hung up on the little details and things like that so we have this installed what what can we do you're not going to do much in here with the free version but if we go to uh a post we have a post and Let me refresh it to load the SEO press stuff as we scroll down first of all you're going to see all this stuff like should be improved this I hate how this just takes up space I don't even use this right here so let's just disable that click the three dots unless you want to keep it preferences scroll down and get rid of this content analysis and now that's going to not display on our posts anymore but what we'll have now is this cool title and then meta description so we can change these if we want to it looks like the title for our site is lowercase so I first want to fix that you kind of see like before without using a plugin like this you could not see what your meta title was going to look like unless Google was going to modify it or your meta description so we can come over here and I think it's pulling it from where's settings General and here we go site title designer Affair and we save it here and refresh this scroll down designer Affair Google won't cut this off it looks cut off right now but Google won't cut this off they'll probably just choose not to display it or rewrite our our title so that's what it looks like so we can modify this if we want to if you want to come in here and individually modify your post you can click on social and have like a different image for each one of your your articles if they're going to share on Facebook or share on Twitter or something like that's pretty powerful stuff you can also do some redirection inside of here but they you can't because you're on the free one you can't do the global redirection in the main uh SEO Press menu over here you can do Global redirections but over here you would just do individual redirections that's one of the limitations of the free plan there's more options in here so now that we have this installed there's a couple things I want to do let's go back to our homepage and I want to open up my about us and terms of use and PR policy and I want to edit each one of these so here's the about us I'm going to scroll down and advanced do not display in our search engine results we're basically no indexing this page and there's various reasons for no indexing these Pages which I won't go into but now we've no index those pages and then the other thing I want to do is is when we share this site so if I were to share this homepage on like Facebook or something like that there'd be no image associated with it and the reason is because we built this entire page with that block Builder and we did not set a featured image so the the work around for this is we can edit this page and then now that we have SEO press installed we can come down here and we can change what this page is going to be so we can say designer affair secrets for your home I wish I had a little blur but I don't have a blur about what oh yeah yeah yeah we have our about us page right let's go there and get our just pull a sentence or two perfect paste this right in there so that's good now we need to put the image in that we want to share so Facebook oh we can even change our title here so let's put a description in here and our title design secrets for your home and then here's the thumbnail so this is the important part so I uploaded a file before this video but I think I might have lost it let's search for it designer Affair there it is so this will become our image if someone shares this homepage now on Facebook or social media and it doesn't look any different on the front end so if we were to reshare it we would not see the change if I delete this and delete this and put this back on here we don't see the change because what you have to do you got to wait a while for it to refresh or you can go to Google or Google and type in Facebook OG debugger and click on sharing debugger and put your URL in here and click debug and click scrape again I don't know it looks like it's hanging over here but I it should be done by now so if I go over here and I put the URL in now we get this cool thing so design secrets for your home your ultimate destination for home inspiration so that looks great looks absolutely great so I don't know if anybody's ever going to share this URL maybe you guys could share this URL but don't just share it the SEO people share it to your wives or your spouses or somebody that's into design so let's see we've installed let's see we've installed fluence Tippets we did Clarity we did H capture we installed perf matters we did SEO press we got that installed we set up our our homepage image and then also no index these last pages here and then the other thing I I don't want to install this I just want to explain this so there's this plugin called mainwp and this is very useful if you have lots of sites if you have five sites or 10 sites or something like that then you might want to start looking into something like this so this is a paid I guess there is a free version so maybe you could just try the free version out but what this is you'll have a site that you'll install the quote unquote server on it's just a plugin and then you'll have child sites that you'll install the child plug-in on and what you can do then is you can go to that main site that the server's on and it will allow you to to basically edit and update all the plugins on your child sites so if you have 10 sites updating all those plugins logging into each one is a total pain it's a total chore but with this you can easily do that I don't have an affiliate or or anything for for that I'm just this course was built around the concept of what we're doing here works well if you're creating a lot of sites but your mileage is going to vary if you're just going to create one site if you're if all you want to do is create one site over the weekend and walk away and never touch anything you you might not succeed it would be better to either have a site we talked about this at the beginning to either S have a site that that you're babying that is maybe you're into hunting and so you're going to create a blog about hunting and you're going to show yourself out there in the woods hunting with your kids and you're going to be talking about hunting and then every now and then you're going to review some products and maybe you'll do a YouTube channel about this yeah you'll grow that site but that's going to be a time investment what we're doing in this video is spinning up a site quickly now this is a long series but I'm showing you how to do this very quickly and then you can spin up another site and another site you could do four sites a month and in a year you could have 40 sites and they're all running on your your server now you might need to bump your server up from two gigabytes of RAM to to four but it's a very inexpensive Endeavor 40 sites that's $400 a year with the hosting maybe a th000 bucks a year for 40 sites this plugin here is something to consider if you start having a lot of sites and and and managing all the plugins and updating becomes problematic so this is a a plugin to think about the other thing I want to talk about backups backups are very important you're spending time and you're also spending money you're spending AI credits image credits you're paying for your host you're paying for these plugins you want to make sure you have backups they're critically important servers fail uh installing plugins maybe you there's a a bad situation in the plugin it's a bad update and it crashes your site what do you do in a situation like that so having a backup is very important and having a backup that's not on your server but is hosted elsewhere is also critically important if your the hard drive dies in the server you've lost your server but you lost your backup too okay so having these externally hosted backups is very important cloudways does that for you if you go to your server and click on backups you can configure how you want the the backups to happen having backups take place every single day and I'm retaining them for one week I can say I want to retain them for two weeks every day you retain a backup it takes up space and right now the space is 4177 megabytes it costs at the moment on cloudways I believe 3.
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